The surprising tricks that can cut your energy bills

We are all facing months of rising bills, with warnings that there may even be blackouts ahead. But all is not lost. Here are ten ways you can cut your energy consumption – and some of them will surprise you…

• Change your lightbulbs – even the ‘energy saving’ ones. If you still have old-style incandescent lightbulbs in your home – or even the original, fluorescent energy-saving bulbs – you are wasting a fortune. A five-watt LED lightbulb produces as much light as an old-style 60-watt lightbulb does. Lighting constitutes the single biggest proportion of most energy bills on account of how often we have the lights on – so this single change can make a significant difference. 
  
• Trade in your petrol hybrid for a diesel car – if you do a lot of long journeys. It might sound counter-intuitive (and heretical in an age in which we are all being persuaded to cut our carbon emissions), but the fact is that on long journeys a diesel engine will burn significantly less fuel – and produce fewer emissions – than many equivalent petrol hybrids. Don’t be fooled by the fantasy official mpg figures. When What Car? magazine tested the real-life economy of popular hybrid cars, some were returning less than 30 mpg.
  
• Get a pair of walking shoes for shorter journeys. According to the government’s National Travel Survey, 59 per cent of our car journeys are for trips under five miles – and around 15 per cent of all journeys of less than a mile are made by car. Petrol and diesel engines work less efficiently when cold, so these are expensive trips when it comes to fuel consumption – making a pair of walking shoes a cost-effective investment. Needless to say, even an electric car is no match for walking when it comes to financial efficiency.
  
• Set a shower time limit. Shorter showers – no more than four minutes – are top of the list of suggestions compiled by the Energy Saving Trust, the government’s quango charged with cutting energy bills. According to its calculations, limiting showers to four minutes could save the average person a remarkable £70 a year in electricity and water bills.
  
• Buy clothes and underwear made from merino wool. Hikers swear by it for a reason. Not only will it keep you warm in winter, meaning you won’t need to crank up the central heating, but it has the remarkable property of avoiding smelling, even when worn for several days – allowing you to cut the number of times you use your washing machine.
  
• Rearrange your furniture. No one enjoys staring at radiators – with the result that we all tend to shove our sofas, tables and other furniture up against them so they are out of sight and out of mind. But that is an expensive mistake, according to the experts. By interfering with the flow of convective currents around the room, we are reducing the efficiency of our heating and wasting money. Far better to move your furniture away and learn to love your radiators.
  
• Dump the gym. As well as saving a fortune in membership fees (and the petrol you might use to get there), exercising in your home can help heat it. At rest, a human body produces around 80 watts of heating power. But a professional cyclist at full pelt can increase this to 400 watts or more – just under half the heating provided by a one-bar electric fire. In other words, think of your exercise bike as an extra radiator.
  
• Keep your heating on 24 hours a day. It might seem odd that you can cut your bills by keeping your heating on for longer – but in the winter, turning it off at night can cause the temperature in your home to fall below dew point, which is when condensation forms on the walls. And if you do end up with condensation, your heating will have to work harder to warm up your home again when you do switch it on in the morning. Central heating works most efficiently when run at a constant temperature – although of course you can save money by turning down the thermostat.
  
• Make sure the logs in your wood-burner are dry. Burning damp, unseasoned logs not only creates large amounts of highly polluting smoke, it also wastes energy. One way to make sure that you can buy the driest logs is to stock up early for the winter. The best, most-seasoned logs tend to get sold first. Later in the season, if demand is high, damper logs are likely to find their way on to the market.
  
• Shop around for an energy provider. For years, consumers have had the right to switch suppliers to find the best energy deals. Yet surveys show that between a quarter and a half of householders have never done it. On a price comparison website such as GoCompare or Compare the Market it only takes minutes to save yourself money.

Fact check: would nationalised energy help UK taxpayers?

Soaring prices have again reignited one of the long-running debates in British politics: should the energy companies be re-nationalised? The Trades Union Congress (TUC) certainly seem to think so, having produced a pithy film which purportedly compares the two sectors in the UK and France. It features a rather baffled looking Brit and a smug looking French girl.

The former claims ‘in Britain, billions in profits go to private energy companies’; the latter that ‘in France, the profits go back to EDF, which is publicly owned by the French people so the profits go back to us and keep the bills lower.’ They contrast the 54 per cent increase in bills in the UK this spring with the 4 per cent with that in France. On this basis, it is argued, Britain should re-nationalise the energy sector to pass such ‘profits’ back to the people.

Yet this comparison with the French system does not in fact tell the full story. For the decision to increase bills in France by just 4 per cent came at a cost; a cost of £7 billion, which is incurred by EDF and, indirectly, the French taxpayer. The price cap announcement by the French government caused EDF to lose a fifth of its market value over the course of a single day, a move that will cost the everyday French citizen, even if they do enjoy lower energy bills.

The cap forced EDF to sell power to rivals at a discount to try to shield French consumers from sharp increases occurring elsewhere around the world. This was a major strain on EDF’s finances because the group sells forward its estimated nuclear output before the end of the budget year and has to buy back sold electricity in a volatile market with prices at historic highs.

Moreover, for all the TUC’s talk of ‘profits’, EDF debts are projected to rise 40 per cent this year to more than £51 billion, all of which is now a taxpayer liability. And, rather than being some kind of magic cash cow for the state to milk, EDF is, in the words of Reuters, ‘a major headache owing to years of delays on new nuclear plants in France and Britain.’

Taxpayers are even going to have shell out a further £5 billion to buy the 16 per cent of EDF not already owned by the state to try to fix its issues, which have seen the value of EDF slump from 33 euros a share in 2005 to close to 11 euros today.
Nationalisation of the British energy industry might have its benefits but the TUC and others making this case ought to be honest about the costs it involves too.

Stupendously good: Much Ado About Nothing, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Simon Godwin’s Much Ado About Nothing is set in a steamy Italian holiday resort, the Hotel Messina, in the 1920s. A smart move, design-wise. The jazz age was one of those rare moments in history when every member of society, from the lowliest chambermaid to the richest aristocrat, dressed with impeccable style and flair. The show is stupendously good to look at it and it kicks off with a thrilling blast of rumba music from a jazz quartet on the hotel balcony. Even sceptics of jazz need not fear these players. The musical score is a triumph for one simple reason: there are no jazz solos.

The comic passages of the play are performed imaginatively enough although some of the stunts – the collapsing hammock and the dodgy ice-cream trolley – become a bit repetitive. Hero’s rejection at the altar and the plot to fake her death are done with real, heart-rending emotion. It’s unusual to see such deep passions emerging from these melodramatic scenes.

John Heffernan plays Benedick with a wonderfully relaxed informality. He’s strange to look at. Geeky, weak-kneed at times, but he happens to be tall and handsome too, with a nimble physicality. He strikes a perfect balance between the hero’s virile swagger and his melancholy, ruminative nature. You’ll wait years to see a better Benedick. Katherine Parkinson delivers Beatrice’s verbal bullets with impish drawling aggression – but she’s not always fully audible.

David Judge plays Don John as a taut, wound-up gangster with strong hints of Salford in his voice. Which is fine on its own, but it doesn’t suit the setting. How many Mancunian bad boys would you meet on the Italian Riviera in the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald?

Eben Figueiredo plays the shifty, preening Claudio with a London ‘roadman’ accent. Perhaps he wants to make teenagers from south London feel involved. Two snags there: the NT is unlikely to attract droves of youngsters. And it’s Shakespeare: he makes everyone feel involved. Relax. He’ll do the work for you – if you let him.

The outstanding performance comes from Phoebe Horn, as Margaret, who draws the eye instantly whenever she appears. It’s rare to find a youngster attempting to upstage the entire cast of a mega-budget Shakespeare production. And it’s even rarer to see the ploy come off so beautifully. Horn shares long scenes with seasoned thesps and she dominates the action from a minor position. It’s a bit naughty pilfering the limelight like this but she earns every bit of the applause she wins. Nature has blessed her with the looks of Susan Hampshire and the comedy skills of Sarah Crowe. A star on the rise.

Freud’s Last Session, by Mark St Germain, is about a meeting between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud on 3 September 1939. The date puts the characters under lots of pressure. They listen to Chamberlain’s radio broadcasts about Hitler. Freud makes anxious phone calls to his daughter, Anna. And the first air-raid siren causes them to panic as they realise they have nowhere to shelter.

But these external influences are artistically unsatisfying. A good drama should find conflict from within the characters and their relationships. The dominant theme is God. As a child, Lewis paid no more attention to Christianity than a ‘gibbon pays to Beethoven’. Freud’s broad-minded Jewish father allowed their Catholic nanny to take young Sigmund to Mass and to receive the sacraments. But with little effect. Freud wasn’t the first worshipper to be converted to atheism by Catholic priests. But he retained a lifelong fascination with religion, and his desk is crowded with effigies of gods from the Greek, Egyptian and Hindu traditions.

Lewis (Sean Browne) believes the Christian God wants us to perfect ourselves through suffering. To Freud (Julian Bird), that’s offensive. A child’s death or a terminal illness are surely evidence of God’s antipathy to mankind. And with Hitler on the march across Europe, the commandment of Christ to ‘love they neighbour’ is an instruction to support the aggressor. By turning the other cheek we enable the triumph of evil. How can that be good?

The script doesn’t flinch from the grisly realities of Freud’s terminal condition. The tumour growing in his jaw makes his pet dog scamper away in horror. He wears a prosthetic steel plate that causes him agony and he refuses to let anyone adjust it but his daughter. The pain increases and Lewis offers to improvise an emergency operation as Freud sits on his famous couch. So the couch becomes a dentist’s chair and Lewis turns into a nurse or even a surrogate child, like Anna.

This is an excellent drama of ideas. It’s deliberately discursive and lacking in spectacle or physical action. Well worth 90 minutes of anyone’s time.

Alienatingly sweet and warm: BBC2’s The Newsreader reviewed

When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of W1A, The Day Today and, savagest of all, Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, the industry has looked in the mirror and ripped itself to shreds. What all these comedies say, in their own way, is that most TV is bombastic, brain-dead, two-star crap put together in a blind panic and a moral vacuum by idiots and monsters. Second only to politics, it’s the satirists’ biggest sitting duck, the gift that can’t stop giving.

The Newsreader, a new newsroom drama, turns out to be cut from different cloth. It’s set in Australia and the 1980s, for one, which means it’s about neither here nor now. Prepare for niche references to Allan Border, or Allan Broader as he’s called by a debut anchorman nervously misreading the autocue. (For context, that’s a cricketing misnomer on a par with, say, Ben Strokes.) But you won’t actually need to know your baggy green captains to feel at home, or remember who crocodile-wrangling Paul Hogan is or was.

If time and place put The Newsreader at a double distance, the most alienating thing is that it’s actually quite sweet and warm. It would be easy to make fun of news bulletins in the pre-digital age, but that would be punching down. In the opening scene a chewed-up VHS tape establishes that we have travelled back to the past. Everything else still feels familiar. The boss is a shouty old bully. The senior newsreader is an ageing alpha male who conspires to keeps his ambitious female co-presenter down. Television still lives in a version of this world, what with women until recently denied equal pay by the BBC.

At the heart of the story is preppy young producer Dale Jennings (Sam Reid), a news nerd who practises his bulletin voice in the car and the bathroom. When his chance to read the news eventually comes it’s a train wreck, but he’s soon coached to do better by Helen Norville (Anna Torv), the firecracker female newsreader with whom he forms an uplifting, patriarchy-undermining alliance.

While there’s plenty of levity, there is seriousness too. The big news event in the first episode is the mid-air explosion of the USS Challenger, which is unflinchingly shown on screen – twice. The final episode (of six) will bring Chernobyl. Aids also lurks in the wings. Amazingly, The Newsreader was filmed in Melbourne in and among Australia’s super-restrictive lockdowns. That it’s being aired at Sunday primetime on BBC2 is, at a guess, down to the interrupted supply line of homegrown drama since the pandemic. It deserves it. It’s old news, but good news.

In other ways the media landscape has mutated beyond recognition. Take the cautionary parable told in the absorbing documentary My Insta Scammer Friend. Its anti-heroine was Caroline Calloway, a young American who joined Instagram in its infancy and began posting images of her wonderful life as a Cambridge student swanning around Europe. With long oversharing captions she had soon hooked a vast young female following. ‘She was kind of like me but better,’ explained one repentant woman who had sucked it all up. The relationship bloomed into full co-dependency: they rejoiced in the illusion of friendship while she landed a fat book deal.

Hubris came about only when Calloway started marketing herself in real life as a hostess of so-called creativity workshops. Hosting, it turns out, requires more effort and organisation than posting. Fans twigged that they had been gulled, though efforts to cancel their fallen idol failed when she simply rebranded herself as a scammer. She gets full marks for brass neck.

Teenage girls discovering their icons have feet of clay is a modern rite of passage. Formerly it might be revealed that their fave boy-band mannikins were actually into LSD and orgies. Nowadays too-good-to-be-true influencers are exposed for monetising fantasy. In this tale of mutual enablement, each needy party was the other’s Frankenstein’s monster. The interviewees, several filmed doing their make-up, are wise and articulate about their false prophetess only after the event.

Alas it was a no-show from the belle of the ball. A complex character who got in too deep and has since gone to ground like a cryptoqueen of Instagram, she did submit a self-exculpating statement. More revealingly, in a podcast she bragged about ‘how hard it is to conjure money, fame and power out of thin air’. Perhaps someone could find work for her and her magic money tree at the Treasury.

In defence of country-pop

I am aware that the music I enjoy is widely considered to be the worst ever produced in human history. Worse than a roomful of children with recorders, cymbals and malice; worse than a poultry abattoir. Every so often, someone will ask me what I listen to, and I’m forced to tell them the truth. ‘These days,’ I’ll say, ‘it’s mostly country.’ Their nose will wrinkle, as if I’ve just let out a stealthy fart in their direction. ‘But old country, right?’ they’ll say, almost pleading. ‘Classic country?’ No, not classic country. I like Johnny Cash fine, I appreciate Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings and all the other respectable stalwarts you’re allowed to enjoy as a vaguely bookish Jew from north London. But the stuff that really hits me right in the chest cavity is the ugly, overproduced industry trash released somewhere between 2000 and 2016, in which there’s no storytelling, no ‘three chords and the truth’, no poignancy, no heartbreak, and in which the primary object of erotic fascination is a truck.

I am not even slightly kidding about the trucks. Probably the most utterly perfect example of the genre is Brad Paisley’s 2003 masterpiece, ‘Mud on the Tires’. He croons, over fiddles and banjo: ‘I’ve got some big news/ The bank finally came through/ And I’m holding the keys to/ A brand new Chevrolet…’ The person he’s singing to is presumably a woman, a wife or girlfriend, and he tries to spin his purchase into a romantic opportunity. With this thing, we can go anywhere; we can go past where the dirt roads end, take a trip out into the back country, just the two of us…

Tell you what we need to do Is grab a sleeping bag or two Build us a little campfire And then with a little luck We might just get stuck Let’s get a little mud on the tires.

Some people have attempted to interpret this song as an elaborate metaphor for sex. It is not. It’s about a truck: about getting your truck stuck in a slick of liquid mud, pushing down hard on the accelerator, the wheels spinning faster, going nowhere, but spraying mud all over the place. The faint image of Paisley’s silent interlocutor, sitting frustrated in the passenger seat: she expected sex, but instead she’s the witness to a far more sacred union. Man, mud, tyres, truck; the sheer ecstasy of it, the panting engine, the wet sounds of the mire underneath…

As it happens, there’s a reason Paisley refers specifically to a Chevy. The company paid him.

There are more of these, infinitely more. Kip Moore’s 2011 ‘Somethin’ ’Bout a Truck’ again tries to gesture towards some kind of ordinary human sexuality – a girl in a red sundress, a beer, a kiss – but keeps on diverting itself back to the truck, that holy symbol standing in its farmer’s field. Jason Aldean goes further; his 2014 track ‘If My Truck Could Talk’ dispenses with the girl entirely. It’s not, as you might expect, a love song to the truck, not entirely. Instead, the gimmick is that Aldean’s truck has been through so many scrapes with him that if it could talk, he’d have to kill the thing.

If my truck could talk, I’d have to yank out all the wires Pour on the gas, set it on fire, anything to shut it up It’s been good to me, but it knows too much, he’d sing it all I’d have to find a riverbank and roll it off If my truck could talk

Sixty years ago, country music was basically about murdering your wife. Love and violence; heartbreak, regret. Somehow, by the 2010s, the same energies were funnelled into music about murdering your car. People still tend to associate country with some notion of rural backwardness, Southern swamps, trailer incest – but this is music from a J.G. Ballard nightmare-future. A cyberpunk world of machine sexuality, machine sadism, sex-death in the bowels of the machine. Country-pop is the most utterly modern music there is.

Trucks are not the only fetish-objects, of course. The holy trinity of the golden age of objectively awful bro-country is the truck, the pair of blue jeans, and the cold beer. There are endless songs devoted to each, but the really special ones are those, like the Zac Brown Band’s ‘Chicken Fried’ from 2003, that manage to run through all of them. Less an actually coherent narrative, and more a sort of ritual prayer, naming the totems in turn:

You know I like my chicken-fried Cold beer on a Friday night A pair of jeans that fit just right And the radio up…

About midway through the song, the music quietens down for a moment, and the tone turns solemn: military drums roll for Zac Brown’s tribute to the men and women of the US Armed Forces. ‘Salute the ones who died,/ the ones who gave their lives, so we don’t have to sacrifice/ all the things we love…/ like our chicken fried.’ Every kid whose brains were splattered against the floor of a defoliated jungle, everyone incinerated by a roadside IED in the Hindu Kush: it was all worth it, for the greater good of blue jeans and beer.

What you have to understand is that country music does not, strictly speaking, exist. A century ago, white and black Americans in Appalachia and the South were creating broadly the same kind of music, mongrel string-band tunes thrown together from blues and Celtic folk. With the emergence of commercial radio, though, a wall was thrown up. Anything produced by white artists was sold as ‘hillbilly music’, and later as country. Anything produced by black artists was sold as ‘race music’. Racially mixed string bands – of which there had once been quite a few – couldn’t find a footing; they died out. And eventually, black artists stopped making the music that had once been theirs; it was hard to sell race records that sounded too hillbilly. They moved on, and invented all of 20th-century pop culture instead.

What defines country isn’t so much a musical style as a set of symbolic markers. The genre has repeatedly poached from the inheritors of ‘race music’ – first rock, and more recently hip-hop; there are plenty of country songs that feature drum loops and even rapping – but what counts are the totems. They conjure an image that bears about as much relation to the actual lives of its listener base as it does to mine. Only 1.4 per cent of the US workforce is engaged in direct agricultural production, and a good chunk of those are impoverished Central American migrants, forced from their own farms by Nafta, reduced to picking fruit in the deadly heat for nakedly exploitative wages. A huge portion of American farmland is owned by massive agribusinesses – increasingly, massive agribusinesses owned by the Chinese state. The independent farmers that remain are squeezed by the demands of big business. Tractor manufacturers, for instance: if the air conditioner on your John Deere breaks down, you can’t fix it yourself; you have to take it to an approved mechanic for a wildly inflated price. Otherwise, the tractor’s software will simply shut the whole thing down. None of these indignities of rural life make it into mainstream country music; most of its listeners are in the suburbs. Instead of telling meaningful stories, it parades the cultural signifiers of a type of person who, for the most part, no longer exists. Its ire is saved for sneering big-city liberals, but mostly it just frots itself against a truck.

All this sounds like a critique, but it’s not. I genuinely do love this music. ‘Mud on the Tires’ is an almost perfect song. I love the twanging vocals; I love the skittery banjo and the rasp of the strings. In a few notes it conjures up the great myth of an imaginary rural America: not a place where anyone actually lives, but a place we do get to visit. Every second of this mad hologram is intoxicating: the Oklahoma rodeos, the Texas honky-tonks, the Carolina BBQs, the Nashville bars where they play songs about trucks for people who just flew in from Boston for an insurance conference. This whole genre is dedicated to propping up a fantasy, but it’s a beautiful and enchanting fantasy. Purer, because it’s not real. I can’t even drive, but I want the truck. I am here in grey old Europe, but I want a deep-fried steak, a Coors Light, a barefoot girl in blue jeans, and a vast open sky. I want dirt on my boots. I’m beyond help. I love it.

That hologram is fading, though. Mockery works: Don Quixote embarrassed centuries of Arthurian romance into silence; when Merlin and co. popped up again in Hollywood, Monty Python shut them down just as fast. Bro-country’s Quixote was ‘Girl in a Country Song’, a 2014 single by the duo Maddie & Tae. It’s a brilliant, pitch-perfect satire of every dumb-jock trope in every dumb-jock anthem:

We used to get a little respect Now we’re lucky if we even get To climb up in your truck Keep our mouths shut, and ride along Down some old dirt road we don’t even want to be on And be the girl in a country song

They got to the heart of it: this stuff was never about the girl, and always about the truck. The girl was just an elaborate hood ornament. It took a few years to stop thrashing, but now that genre is basically dead. These days, the dominant mode in Nashville is what’s been called ‘boyfriend country’: soulful, sensitive, schmaltzy songs about love, sonically identical to any other kind of pop music, but delivered in the ghost of a Southern twang. Its main platform isn’t the Grand Ole Opry, but The Bachelor. Backing tracks produced by Scandinavians. There’s hardly a banjo or a haystack in sight.

Yes, there are interesting developments happening elsewhere. Top 40 country radio has finally caved in and started playing music by Tyler Childers, currently the great hope for people who like to talk about what real country used to mean. This is absolutely a positive step. Sturgill Simpson has returned to country after a few years flitting around with disco beats and synths. Kelsey Waldon’s voice still trembles with suffering. The Turnpike Troubadours are back together, and if you don’t think Evan Felker is the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century it can only be because you haven’t been paying attention. All these people make music that really does reflect life in the fields and the hollers; the good country music is, well, good. But it’s not the same. I still miss the bright insistence of the caricature, that pure, blinding image. A field of corn. A cowboy hat. A truck. A truck. A truck.

Germany’s energy crisis is a warning to Britain

During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy. A decade on and it is Berlin doing the begging. Europe has reluctantly agreed a 15 per cent cut in gas use this winter in the hope that German factories can stay open and German citizens can keep from freezing. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom threatened to reduce the gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline yet again so that Germany would receive only a fifth of the amount it did before the Ukrainian invasion.

While Berlin has said it plans to wean itself off Russian gas over the next few years, Vladimir Putin is taunting Europe by cutting supplies faster than Germany can cut its dependence. The German government has calculated that it needs gas storage levels to be at 80 per cent to get through the winter. Reserves are currently just two-thirds full and there is little hope of further topping up the tanks while Putin is squeezing the supply. Spanish and Italian factories and householders have, in effect, agreed to cut their own gas usage in order to prop up the German economy.

Some EU member states have been allowed a little leeway – Spain has secured a cut of only 7 per cent, an acknowledgment that it was not foolish enough to rely on Russia. One Spanish minister remarked pointedly: ‘We have not lived beyond our means in terms of energy.’ Ireland, Malta and Cyprus, which have no direct connection to the European gas grid, have also been granted an exemption. But it is obvious that the rest of the EU is being dragged into the effort to save Germany from national embarrassment. About 40 per cent of Germany’s 41 million households heat with gas. German internet searches for firewood are up tenfold since this time last year.

Berlin has no excuse for ending up in this position. Twenty years ago, it was possible to believe that Putin would finally bring his country into the community of democratic western states – Tony Blair, after all, repeatedly invited the new Russian leader to Downing Street. Those democratic hopes eventually evaporated and yet Germany continued to entrench its dependence on Russian energy. Even at the start of this year, Germany’s leaders were pushing for the completion of Nord Stream 2, a pipeline deal signed after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Meanwhile, Germany’s three remaining nuclear power stations were closed just as Russian tanks amassed on Ukraine’s borders and western intelligence warned that a full-scale invasion was imminent. In a last-ditch attempt to keep the lights on, the Greens have agreed to restart the country’s mothballed coal power stations. But reports in the press suggest the infrastructure is no longer there to feed the turbines; Germany’s ageing rail network is short on coal trucks and storage sheds.

The rest of Europe is now being asked to pay the price for German myopia. Of course, this would have included Britain had we still been a member of the European Union. UK consumers are already paying high prices for energy, but were it not for Brexit we would be facing even sharper prices and perhaps even rationing. Our record on renewables, too, is better than many would think. No G20 country has made more progress on decarbonisation than Britain over the past decade, either in terms of energy produced or the overall carbon footprint, imports included. Our CO2 emissions have almost halved since the turn of the century and are now at levels not seen since Victorian times. Renewables generate 43 per cent of our energy: less than 5 per cent of our gas comes from Russia, compared with half of Germany’s.

All of this helps with energy security, but Britain is far from immune to the shocks facing our neighbours. This week, the UK was forced to dip into its own gas storage supplies thanks to a lack of wind. And during this month’s heatwave, we were forced to pay 5,000 per cent over the odds to import Belgian energy to avoid a London blackout.

Energy diversification is our best insurance. That means fully exploiting North Sea gas and oil as well as fracking. We cannot be reliant on intermittent solar and wind power until there are adequate ways to store renewable energy. While we await technology to cut carbon emissions, we need more reliable sources of fossil fuels – fuels that in some cases are sitting below our feet. We need to access these not just for the sake of energy security but, as Germany has demonstrated, for our political security. Reliance on oil- and gas-rich rotten regimes is no way to ensure the safety of your citizens.

Britain should not take any pleasure in Berlin’s predicament. Germany’s economic and political strength is in the interests of us all, not least as a counterbalance to Putin’s Russia. Germany remains one of Britain’s biggest trading partners, and the country is now facing almost certain recession at a time when the euro is under renewed strain. Throughout the sovereign debt crisis, it was at least possible to look to the strong German economy for salvation. Not this time.

Escaping the memory of Liz Truss: Noci reviewed

Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the now long closed Bistro du Vin in Dean Street: a Hotel du Vin without a hotel, and so bereft. It had a bookshelf on which all the books were painted neon, and they flew out in lumps when you tugged at them. I wonder if Liz wanted political PR advice from this column, but I doubt it, because I think you can’t fake integrity, and I get my political PR advice from watching The West Wing. Let Truss be Truss. But Truss is Truss. Or rather Truss is Trusses: she is both myriad, and none. It is possible that the book spines gave better political PR advice. They understand colour blocking.

I knew her at college and alumni are confused. My college doesn’t like being named in print, like aristocratic women of the 19th century, and it is a nursery for civil servants, not for those investigating the propaganda value of colour blocking, insinuating that you would, if it were helpful, fire an asylum seeker out of a cannon. I try not to judge romantic fantasies, and I did defend her from the Turnip Taliban when they came for her with rubber pitchforks – but Mark Field? Really? Google ‘Mark Field assaults tankie + happy’ for details.

I have analysed the alumni testimony and it essentially says: she moved through us like a ghost; she left no trace upon us; who is she? It could be that she only mirrored: that is my belief – but my husband, who held hands with her at a party once (a Van de Graaff generator was involved) and so has a parallel life in which he is Mr Truss and he is the one who looks frightened at the edges of photographs, says we just weren’t paying attention.

So I have only a small amount of testimony to add to my testimony that she was called Liz and was a Liberal Democrat, an identity she gathered around herself like a glittering shroud. She could have been an excellent wine critic, which is both irritating and pleasing. When I arrived at the Bistro du Vin, she had two tiny glasses in front of her. ‘This one,’ she pointed to a red, ‘is savage. This one,’ she pointed to the white, ‘tastes of peas.’

I know people whose lives were ruined by meeting David Cameron at Oxford. I have no intention of letting that fate befall this column, so I go to Noci in Islington to recover. There is no chance of meeting Liz here. She is on tour, insinuating that she would, if it were helpful, fire an asylum seeker out of a cannon.

Noci is under a green awning on Islington Green, which is a fantasy socialist republic filled with the kind of people I want to punch: not because they are socialists, but because they are unserious and performative socialists. Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency is slightly to the north, and I am relieved that he is not here. There’s too much political extremism in this column already. It throbs and trills with it.

Inside, it is hushed: pale wood; pale marble; glass. This is not my kind of Italian cuisine, which is the kind that screams with tomatoes and blackened onions, and still has the oedipal pepper grinders, but if you want hushed, elegant, modern Italian cuisine to match your cashmere neutral shrug, this is it.

We eat burrata; asparagus salad; silk handkerchiefs; lamb ravioli; pesto zitti. It’s soothing, I suppose, to eat food so refined and bloodless when the world beyond is nothing like.

The parallel universe you can explore on two wheels

Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own genuine, and literally parallel, universe that we can escape into at any moment. It’s the National Cycle Network that threads its way quietly and meanderingly over, under and alongside our gridlocked main roads and our daily lives.

Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with supposedly ‘broken Britain’ all over again. You’ll be reminded that it’s a country of dog-walkers, rivers, farms and front gardens. And you don’t have to wear Lycra to do this. You just need ordinary clothes, plus KitKats, Thermos and sandwiches, and off you trundle at 8 mph.

You might have seen the National Cycle Network signs, red on blue, beckoning you off the road on to a smaller lane. Once you notice one, you’ll start spotting them everywhere, discreetly glued on to lampposts all over the country. Route 1 meanders from Dover to the Highlands; Route 2 from Dover to St Austell; Route 3 from Land’s End to Bristol; Route 4 from Greenwich to Fishguard. Route 61 happens to go from St Albans to Windsor, and there are many others. The long ones would take years to complete at my rate of 25 miles per day, but completing them is not the point. Pedalling through Britain at its most gentle, from settlement to settlement, is the point.

The routes were designed by the charity Sustrans, which might put you off. I hate the name Sustrans, which sounds vaguely like a Latin gerundive but is in fact an unattractive copulation of two words. And I don’t like being made to feel I’m doing a bike ride in order to pursue a sustainable mode of transport. I do it for the pure joy of it. The designers, though, are in every other way kindred spirits to me. Like the best eccentric schoolmaster who deviates from the official subject and goes off on a much more interesting tangent to do with his own enthusiasms, the designers of the National Cycle Network are always veering off, taking you on the romantic route through the orchard, never mind if it takes longer, and they educate and inspire you in the process. In the era of satnavs programmed always to calculate the quickest course, this is the much-needed antidote.

‘What are they going to throw at us next?’ I’ve often wondered, as I’ve drifted through un-famous bits of Kent, Berkshire and Essex following the ever-reassuring ‘1’ or ‘4’ signs, which make me feel some guardian angel is steering me into undreamed-of corners of the country. How, without these route designers and their ‘Slow Britain’ agenda, would I ever have discovered the disused railway line that goes eastwards from Hadleigh in Suffolk? Or the suburban charms of California on the outskirts of Ipswich? Or the fields to the west of Maidenhead through which, magically, there are cyclable paths?

It feels like a very old Britain, one of lanes and drovers’ roads; much more meandering than Roman Britain. Settlements grow outwards, but on a bike you approach them in the other direction, along their small back roads, through allotments, playing fields and housing estates. You see, and briefly experience, thousands of other lives you could happily have lived: parallel lives in a parallel universe.

The next PM’s growing to-do list

In theory, the Conservative leadership contest could have stretched to the autumn, but the 1922 Committee and CCHQ decided to crunch the timetable due to the sheer number of crises facing the country. So Tory MPs had only a fortnight to choose the final two candidates, which did perhaps change the course of the race. Given the support that Kemi Badenoch managed to raise in a short period, it is not hard to imagine her being in the last two if she had been given more time to make her case.

A longer contest would also have allowed the Tories more time to think about what changes they need to make if they are to win a fifth term. But for all the problems posed by a short competition, the essential logic of that judgment holds. The problems facing the incoming PM have, if anything, got worse since the leadership race started. It would be untenable for the UK to still have a caretaker government in September.

Take the energy crisis. Vladimir Putin’s agenda is simple: to prevent Germany’s gas-storage facilities being filled up during the summer months so Europe will be vulnerable during the winter. The UK takes less Russian gas than most European countries (5 per cent compared with 40 per cent), but as Moscow weaponises energy supplies, the resulting inflation and economic slowdown will affect this country.

The heatwaves striking Europe are also leading to higher energy usage. The outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi asked back in April: ‘Do you want air conditioning or peace?’ In the heat, Italians picked air conditioning. Europe’s continued energy dependence on Russia will make peace on terms acceptable to Ukraine more difficult to achieve. At the same time, the French nuclear reactors have been hit with problems: about half of them are offline. France is now producing its lowest amount of nuclear power so far this century.

Such issues are being worsened by grid problems. Within the EU, it is hard to find ways to move gas imported from North Africa into Spain across the continent, while in the UK grid congestion can make it difficult to transport the power generated by wind farms in Scotland around the country. Energy expert Javier Blas revealed this week that on 20 July London came close to a blackout and that the UK had, albeit briefly, paid £9,724 per megawatt hour to import electricity from Belgium – 50 times higher than the typical price and more than four times the previous record. Such spikes are likely to become more common.

Britain is still lumbered with the energy price cap mechanism introduced under David Cameron. This means that shortly before the new PM takes office, Ofgem will announce the October rise: it’s expected to be about £3,240, a 60 per cent increase on today’s levels and 150 per cent higher than where things were a year ago. This will be felt across the country. The new resident of No. 10 will have to decide whether to soften this blow with more compensatory payouts (all households should by now have received at least £400).

The invasion of Ukraine is perhaps the principal reason energy prices are so high. British policy towards Ukraine won’t change, no matter who wins. It will, though, become harder to hold together the western alliance as Putin continues to use energy to hold Europe to ransom. The coming Italian elections are unlikely to make things better. The invasion is also one of the factors behind the rise in global food prices. So inflation will remain high, squeezing living standards. The Bank of England expects inflation to remain above 6 per cent this time next year.

High inflation makes nearly everybody poorer. It will also lead to industrial action as public sector unions demand pay settlements that allow their members to keep pace with inflation (or the average 7 per cent pay rise being seen in the private sector).

One of the other contributions to inflation is the dislocation caused by Covid. It is not only global supply chains that have not yet recovered from the pandemic – the NHS hasn’t either. Waiting lists are still growing, and it is very hard to see how the Tories can win an election if these lists are approaching ten million by 2024.

The worry for the incoming prime minister will be that the NHS is struggling day-to-day as well. The West Midlands ambulance service, for example, is expected to spend 48,000 hours waiting to hand over patients this month. Mark Docherty, its director of nursing, has warned that patients are dying needlessly every day and that service may break down next month.

The Covid lockdowns were driven in part by Tory fears of a ‘Black Wednesday’ moment for the NHS. They felt that they could not recover politically from a moment when hospital services were overwhelmed – it would make it too easy for their opponents to simply say ‘you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS’. But the pile-up that has resulted from patients not being treated during lockdown could conspire to bring about a winter crisis on such a scale that the public believes the health service is collapsing.

If such domestic challenges were not enough, there is also the international situation. The ill-handled issue of the potential visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, has made tensions between the US and China over the region much worse. It was foolish to let it be known so long in advance that she might visit, and disastrous to then suggest that she might not go because the US military were worried about her plane being shot down.

The new prime minister will face the most challenging first three months in the job of any PM in recent memory. The first impression he or she makes with the public may well be decisive.

Spare us the preaching: The Railway Children Return reviewed

It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on iPlayer. Just to test my capacity to cry, having emerged dry-eyed from the new one, I came home and re-watched the original. Yup. The 2022 sequel has three scenes of the new cohort of Railway Children – three second world war evacuees from Manchester, Lily, Pattie and Ted – waving goodbye to their soldier father as he departs for war, in the fog, never to return. Violins soar. Eyes remain dry. The 1970 film has just one scene of Daddy arriving home, in the fog of a steam train, and it still makes me sob every time.

So is a return more moving than a departure? It certainly can be, but you have to live through the desolation first. The original film was carried by the young Jenny Agutter, whose beautiful speaking voice as narrator trying to make sense of her father’s disappearance captivated the world. ‘We were not the Railway Children to begin with,’ were her opening lines, straight from E. Nesbit, and we were swept off our feet.

It’s a good idea to have three Manchester children holed up in Yorkshire this time round. The three child actors, Beau Gadsdon, Eden Hamilton and Zac Cudby, look adorable in their berets and Fair Isle jerseys and say their lines well at the evacuee-selecting, nit-checking ceremony in the village hall. (‘Will you take ooz?’ ‘No one’s chosen ooz. We’re too many.’) And, blissfully, Jenny Agutter, as Bobbie – yes, the very same Bobbie, now a granny! – is the one who takes them in, along with her daughter Annie (Sheridan Smith) and sweet grandson Thomas (Austin Haynes).

And off they all run, through the buttercup meadow down to the railway line. This could be good. But what has scriptwriter Danny Brocklehust decided should be the overwhelming driver of the plot? No, not the disappearance of fathers, although two soldier fathers are missing in this version, both the children’s and Thomas’s, but racism in the American army.

The injured stranger whom the children discover hiding out in a disused brake van (he has a lovely bleeding leg, oozing ketchup just like the cross-country runner’s in the original) is a young black American soldier called Private Abe McCarthy. They bring him supplies and then hide him in the house. It turns out that what he’s really escaping from is the culture of racist abuse in the US Army stationed in Britain, in which black soldiers are beaten up for having relationships with white women. The baddies here are the white-helmeted American military police, an inhuman force, like the stormtroopers in Star Wars.

Will children really be captivated by this anti-racism storyline? The educational message tugs at the morality strings, but not quite at the heartstrings. Sample lines: ‘The Nazis don’t like people different from themselves.’ ‘And they’re not the only ones.’ Thrown in for good lesson-teaching measure are a handful of feminist quips: ‘I wish Churchill had been more helpful to us Suffragettes,’ says Bobbie. And, to her uncle in the civil service: ‘How many women are there in senior positions in your department?’

The only thing that almost did make me cry was the news that Peter – sweet Peter, Bobbie’s younger brother – died in the first world war. Of course he did. It was inevitable. But it’s a bitter pill to swallow.

The coming together of the massed gaggle of village children in the final act of the film, who frantically wave red banners to try to stop the train in which Abe and Lily are handcuffed, has a nice Emil and the Detectives and Hue and Cry charm. It’s so nearly good. Just spare us the preaching, please.

The etymological ingredients of ‘flageons’

‘Don’t you know the answer?’ asked my husband with mock surprise, throwing over to me from his armchair a copy of the Daily Telegraph. The question, from a reader on the Letters page, was what Mrs Beeton meant by flageons of veal. I had no idea and nor did the Oxford English Dictionary in 20 volumes.

The recipe was for a sort of giant hamburger or hot meatloaf made from minced veal, suet, eggs and breadcrumbs. That gave no clues about its name. It could hardly have connections with flagons or flagellation.

A day later another reader found in her edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management from 1915 the recipe under the name fladeons. It looked as though later editions had misprinted the word. But fladeon wasn’t in the OED either.

It was only a couple of days later that a learned reader, Howard Stephens of Norfolk, broke the logjam by identifying the word as fladéon in French, which he presumed came from the Latin fladonem, ‘flat cake’. Brilliant. It was rather like finding a genealogy linking you up with a member of the royal family, leading every which way.

The Latin flado, fladonem gives us flan, via French flan, a word that came into English with Alexis Soyer and his The Gastronomic Regenerator: A Simplified System of Cookery in 1846. Before then we had flawns, also deriving from fladonem. In The Romance of the Rose, from 1400, there is a reference, the dictionary tells me, to ‘deynte flawnes, brode and flat’.

Some link this word flawn with the ancient Greek plathanon, ‘cake-mould’, and platus, ‘broad’, which in the 19th century was used to give a name to the duck-billed platypus, with its broad, flat feet. The duck-bill was put into Latinised Greek for the binomial name of the species as Ornithorhyncus anatinus.

From the same ancient root that produced fladonem, the Germans derive Fladen. Fladen in German means ‘pancake’, and also ‘cowpat’, with the composite form Kuhfladen.

So it turns out that flageons is a ghost word, born of a misprint out of a French term hardly well-known either. But it’s useful to have a name ready when the family asks at dinner: ‘What’s this?’

Rishi’s mad dash: can he catch up with Truss?

Just a couple of weeks ago, Rishi Sunak was the clear bookies’ favourite in the Tory leadership contest. He had the largest parliamentary support and was set to top every round of MPs’ voting. He had 20,000 volunteers, a well-organised team, a slick launch – and (he thought) all of August to convince party members that he was the real deal. His strength, his supporters argued, was a firmer grasp of policy and better verbal dexterity than his opponents. So the final format – a dozen head-to-head debates – would give him time to win.

Then, disaster. The Tories became paranoid that the unions could sabotage the process with a Royal Mail strike, so Conservative campaign headquarters announced they would send out the voting papers almost as soon as the final two had been selected. They did delay this a little after an outcry from the campaign teams, but only by a week. As one sceptical MP puts it: ‘There’s little point having a seven-week contest if the ballots drop at the beginning.’

So rather than a long summer, Sunak finds himself with barely a week to close what suddenly seems to be a big gap. A YouGov poll found Tory members backing Liz Truss by a margin of 24 points, so Sunak badly needs everything to go right. That seems a stretch. Although he narrowly won with the general public in last week’s BBC debate, Truss came out on top in polling of the Tory membership. Sunak’s attempt to catch up on Tuesday was thwarted when the moderator fainted and the debate was called off. Potentially, he now has only days to close the gap.

‘It could all be over before we even get to mid-August,’ predicts a government aide. Members – like Tory voters at large – tend to vote quickly; typically, just over half by return of post. ‘The dynamics of the race are that people vote very early and people have made up their minds,’ says a seasoned MP. Although the rules technically allow members to vote a second time online if they change their mind over the summer – with the last ballot cast the one that’s counted – neither camp expects this to be a big change factor. ‘In the nicest way possible, most of the membership are not on apps,’ says one campaign worker.

Publicly, neither side will admit that this is the decisive moment – at the risk of sounding either complacent or as though they are about to give up the fight. But it’s heavily factored into their strategies. ‘The next two weeks are super-important,’ says a Truss supporter. ‘It’s absolutely a sprint.’ Given her seemingly unassailable poll lead, Truss is limiting her exposure to risky media (she passed on an invitation to be interviewed by Andrew Neil) and is focusing on meeting members.

Sunak is doing as many media appearances as he can (including an interview with Charles Moore) and mixing up his initial offerings with red-meat policy announcements and even tax-cutting. After insisting for the first part of the campaign that now is not the time, he has rushed out an announcement to woo supporters by temporarily axing VAT on energy bills – despite arguing against it when chancellor. ‘He must be desperate,’ snipes a member of the Truss camp.

In a sign of the urgency, his performance in their first head-to-head debate was so energetic that it prompted a Truss spokesman to declare ‘he is not fit for office’, because ‘his aggressive mansplaining and shouty private-school behaviour is desperate, unbecoming and a gift to Labour’. Or as another put it after the debate: ‘Rishi is a disgrace.’

‘He doesn’t have an aggressive bone in his body,’ an ally hits back. ‘It just shows he has fire in his belly and passion for the country. The stakes are really high.’

The hope within Team Sunak is that there is still much to play for. Elections have seldom gone as expected in recent years, and the polling excludes a large number of ‘don’t knows’. It’s also the view of Sunak supporters that Truss’s base is much softer than Johnson’s was. ‘It will be close,’ predicts one Sunak backer. ‘We’re gaining ground,’ adds a second.

His campaign will now adopt a three-pronged approach. As well as doing more media, he will meet more members. ‘The one thing we do know is as soon as he meets people he has charm,’ says an ally. He will also double down on his economic message – that only he has the right approach to get a grip on inflation and that Truss’s plans would be unfunded and generally ruinous.

This is where the two candidates vary most – with the Foreign Secretary alleging that Sunak’s proposals will lead to a recession and him retorting that hers will lead to an interest-rates rise that could hurt home-owners across the land. In the BBC debate, Sunak seized on suggestions that her plans could see rates rise as high as 7 per cent. ‘Many of our voters are home-owners; if interest rates rise it matters to them,’ says a backer. Team Rishi believes that polling already shows this is creating doubt in the minds of Truss supporters. The economist Patrick Minford, source of the 7 per cent figure, says he was misquoted and meant 3 per cent.

Yet the very tone of the campaign so far is giving Truss’s people confidence. Sunak may be able to point to wider electoral appeal but he has so far offered little to excite the grassroots. ‘Liz trails on electability and likeability, but remember we elected Iain Duncan Smith in 2001. Our members have their own priorities – they don’t really care as much about the big picture,’ argues a senior MP. ‘Voters’ emotion will trump their logic.’

The Truss message is one of optimism, even if its realism has been questioned. ‘They [Team Sunak] are running a pretty negative campaign,’ says a Truss backer. ‘If people think there is an imaginary river, you don’t tell them there isn’t, you build them an imaginary bridge.’ This is why Truss has been quick to accuse Sunak of peddling Project Fear – despite the fact she was on the other side of it during the Remain campaign.

But there’s another factor making it difficult for Sunak to make up the difference: vengeance. As Lord Heseltine famously said: ‘He who wields the knife never wears the crown.’ ‘There is a small but powerful sense he backstabbed Boris,’ says a senior Tory. ‘It’s not fatal but it’s quite a tricky place to come from.’

Neither Boris Johnson nor his loyalists have been particularly subtle about their anger towards Sunak. They blame him rather than a series of No. 10 scandals for the PM’s demise. An unapologetic Johnson made plenty of thinly veiled references to this in his farewell address at Prime Minister’s Questions, and his supporters have made it clear they don’t think Sunak should succeed him. The Twitter account of Truss backer Nadine Dorries is effectively an attack outlet. She made headlines for calling Sunak out on his fancy clothes while praising the fact Truss’s earrings were from Claire’s Accessories. When pressed, Truss refused to disown the attacks. ‘Nadine is poisonous,’ complains one Sunak supporter. Others worry that he doesn’t have the killer instinct required to deal with this level of vitriol.

While Sunak is expected to fare well in the south and Scotland, much of the new membership joined in 2019 under Boris (some 10,000 of them want him reinstated) and could be more susceptible to the idea that he stabbed Johnson. ‘In focus groups in the Red Wall, there are voters who are angry Johnson is gone,’ says a Labour staffer.

As the campaign progresses, the consensus in the parliamentary party is moving towards a Truss victory. ‘Prime Minister Truss seems to be the accepted wisdom now,’ says a senior Tory. ‘Rishi has good arguments and is a better debater but he is running out of ways to change it dramatically.’ Ambitious MPs who backed other candidates are suddenly speaking positively of the Truss campaign and finding virtues in a politician they once dismissed. There are also whispers that some who have kept their powder dry could come out publicly for her soon.

But the contest is not over yet – and the other way to reduce the distance between the competitors is for the frontrunner to fall. The view among Sunak supporters had been that this could happen in debates and media interviews – but Truss plans to avoid many of these. Ultimately, she has more to lose. ‘We believe we have the popular narrative to take to the country and should now focus on a co-ordinated ground war,’ insists a staffer.

As for the hustings, her performance is improving. She is more relaxed after fighting tooth and nail to make the final two. In the minutes leading up to Monday’s head-to-head, Truss prepared by playing ‘Uptown Funk’ in her green room – telling aides who asked if she was nervous that ‘there was a rod of iron’ in her. ‘She’s enjoying it,’ insists a member of her team.

There is one niggle of doubt among MPs: if Truss is really so far ahead, why do her supporters keep going on the attack so vehemently? It suggests they still view Sunak as an active threat.

If Truss does go all the way, there are those who are trepidatious. ‘She only has the support of a third of the party,’ says an MP and former whip. ‘It will be hard for her to push things through. If she’s smart, she’ll quickly embark on a reshuffle that unifies the party.’ Truss has said she would love Sunak to be in her cabinet, but the real question is whether he would want any job she was prepared to offer. Those close to her suggest she’s unlikely to offer him a great office of state, and if she did it’s still unclear whether he would accept. There are also questions about how much she would be able to compromise once in No. 10. The right of the party took her to the final two and will want results, so she doesn’t have much room for manoeuvre when it comes to her policy plans.

Whoever comes out on top, Tory MPs are increasingly worried that the next chapter will be just as bruising as everything that has led up to it.

How to save Royal Mail

The government’s ‘cost-of-living tsar’, Just Eat co-founder David Buttress, was appointed last month as a Canutian gesture against the inflation tide. He says his role is to encourage retailers and utilities to offer discount deals that might relieve short-term pain for consumers. But wouldn’t it be good if he also had powers to shame companies or sectors for profiteering by whacking their prices up far ahead of inflation? Any firm for which energy or scarce raw materials are major cost elements has possible reason for scorching price rises; many others do not.

Buttress could start by looking into hire-car rates, which have doubled (and more) across Europe since 2019 – stinging holidaymakers who prefer to brave airport queues rather than endure Channel port gridlock in their own cars. International operators such as Avis, Europcar, Hertz and Sixt offer the excuse that having reduced their fleets during the pandemic, they can’t rebuild them fast enough to meet summer demand because global microchip shortages have restricted supply from car factories.

These companies used to be able to buy new cars at deep discounts and sell them profitably at the end of the season. Now they have to pay a premium and bear the depreciation – and have fewer hires in total across which to spread their overheads.

OK, so their costs have gone up a bit. But sufficient to justify a hire-fee increase for a family runabout from around €35 per day to more like €100? Or are they by any chance price-matching upwards to the highest level at which customers, confused by many differing inflation signals, will shrug and hire the car anyway? If you think you’ve spotted opportunist overpricing in other sectors, email martin@spectator.co.uk.

Merci beaucoup

Sizewell C nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast – for which Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has given the go-ahead against the advice of the Planning Inspectorate and the cries of local campaigners – will be capable, we’re told, of meeting 7 per cent of UK electricity needs. Less exciting news is that it probably won’t start generating in my lifetime, while domestic energy bills will rise even higher in the meantime to make consumers share the financial risk of this £20 billion project. Nevertheless, in the absence of other viable or politically acceptable technologies that can provide steady baseload power (as opposed to variable output from wind and solar) on such a scale, it must be the right thing to do.

And the irony is that if it does get done, we’ll have the French government to thank. The developer, French nuclear utility EDF, is about to be renationalised after a rocky passage of part-privatisation, political rows and technical hitches that has left its balance sheet weak and private shareholders unhappy.

State ownership should stabilise EDF – and Sizewell will essentially replicate EDF’s Hinkley Point reactor, due for completion in 2027 and part-financed by China’s state nuclear company. But as Chinese money is barred at Sizewell, other infrastructure investors (from Canada and Australia as well as the City) will rely on EDF’s good standing rather than the blandishments of the dozen secretaries of state who will hold office between now and switch-on date.

We may curse the French for failing to staff their Dover passport booths, but one day we’ll say merci beaucoup for keeping our lights on.

Blessed postmen

I’m struck by parallels between the Church of England and Royal Mail. Both institutions are embedded in our social fabric yet strangely reluctant to play that role in modern Britain. Both have leaders who communicate no coherent vision. Neither seems to value their key workers, whether parish priests or posties. And both are fading in significance, having failed to consolidate the opportunity of the pandemic when their role might have become all the more central.

But if the Church is currently quiescent, it’s all kicking off at Royal Mail. After the Communication Workers Union voted for strike action, management retorted with a threat to split off GLS, the profitable international parcels business, from the troublesome domestic universal-delivery service which is driving losses of £1 million a day after a period in which productivity has ‘gone backwards’, according to chief executive Simon Thompson, amid worsening labour relations. Local service cutbacks, like parish church closures, must follow.

To which my man in the sorting office with a big trolley says: ‘This is what happens when you forget your core business… All the energy went into GLS while successive managements hoped [domestic] Royal Mail would muddle through, old-fashioned and unloved. Compare Deutsche Post DHL, a privatised jewel of German industry and a technology leader as well as a vital national service. In Germany, the dominant union is a partner in the business. In Royal Mail, managers and unions despise each other – and there’s a history of management greed over bonuses that makes matters worse.’

But can Royal Mail ever be turned around, I ask my source, or is the future all about gig-economy white-van men with dodgy satnavs? Oh yes, he says passionately, ‘If you can restore pride, be clear about what you do – connecting every house and business every day – and have the humility to realise it’s all about postmen and women, not management structures, it can be done!’ I’ve told him he ought to be a bishop.

Cabbage salad

Owen Matthews, our fine contributor on Putin’s Russia, has an offbeat suggestion for my sub-£30 lunch search: the George Hotel at Lviv in western Ukraine, which offers late Habsburg grandeur, cheap bedrooms, a view of the city’s monument to the romantic Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz and an ‘everyday menu’ of green borscht, Kyiv cutlet and cabbage salad for a little over £10.

Why Liz Truss shouldn’t be PM

Two and a half years ago I joined the Tory party to vote for Boris, then unjoined as soon as I could. I’ve never been a Tory voter but I believed in Boris and never thought of him as a cliquey, old-school Conservative. Now I’d like to rejoin to keep Liz Truss out. She seems to want to be PM just for the sake of being PM – we’ve had enough of that. But I’m hoist on my own petard. The party has wised up to tactical joining and you need to be a member for six months to vote.

One of the many reasons we have a chronic staffing shortage, it’s said, is that Generation Z only want to do jobs that will protect their mental health, i.e. ones that aren’t too much like hard work. I’m not sure that’s the answer. I think hard work, and even a bit of stress, can sometimes be exactly what the doctor ordered. I remember when my mother, an actress, was 70, out of work and unhappy: so much so that she got shingles. Then the call came to learn the leading role for a play in three weeks and fly to South Africa. The shingles vanished, the play was a triumph and she was happy as Larry. Actors call it ‘Doctor Theatre’. Being needed, being part of a joint enterprise, working hard and getting on with the joys of life – family, charity, hobbies – might be a better recipe for happiness than endless concentration on mindfulness and self-protection.

When we moved to the country 47 years ago, there was no such thing as an app. Just as well – we might not have made the move. Neighbourhood apps would dismay any prospective buyer fondly thinking Little Piddlehampton safer than Chelsea. Imagined as an exchange about coffee mornings and yoga classes, they turn out to be a chronicle of disaster, with reports of donkeys choking on plastic bags discarded by tourists; stolen quadbikes; cats poisoned by anti-freeze; chalked signs on gates intended to tell dognappers where pedigree dogs live; teenagers shooting up in the adventure playground; barbed wire across the footpath in a farmer’s war with ramblers. Miss Marple, we need you.

Wildflowers are all the rage but my efforts never look like the picture on the seed packet. My first mistake was to think wildflowers would love the enriched loam we’d made for the apple orchard. But the grass loved it more and the flowers hadn’t a hope. The next year we cut the grass very short, scarified the ground to leave grass-free patches, sowed lots of yellow rattle – supposed to suppress grass – and tried again with another kilo of expensive seeds. Result: not so much as a daisy. This year we tried on a patch of field. We took off 90 per cent of the topsoil and all the grass, added crushed builders’ rubble, and sowed it with wildflower seeds reaped from one of Prince Charles’s Coronation Meadows (of which there is one in every county, preserved because they’ve never been ploughed or sprayed). And guess what? We have a field of oil-seed rape, docks and thistles. And grass.

My husband, who spent his life in the rag trade, said he learned early to ‘think of the angle’. That is, consider the motive: why is so-and-so offering you a bargain? Is it because he’s a nice chap and he loves you? Or is it because his goods are dodgy? I’ve been ‘thinking of the angle’ in medical matters lately, Do I really need the hygienist to clean my teeth every three months when I obediently use all those horrid little brushes and beaver away with floss and electric toothbrush twice a day? Or does she want the business? The dentist advises whitening my teeth. Why? Are my teeth yellow, or does he have his eye on the lolly? If you consult a doctor in Harley Street about anything, expect to be sent down the road for blood tests, and then further down for scans, and maybe across the street to the dietician and possibly upstairs to the physio. Are all these medics covering their backs in case you sue, or is it jobs for the boys? If Bupa and the rest weren’t meeting the bills, I bet there’d be a lot less mutual back-scratching.

I’m a sucker for magic bullets that promise to lose my belly fat. What’s the matter with me? I know that the answer is to eat less and exercise more. Over the years I’ve joined gyms, which might have worked if I’d gone more than twice. I’ve done every diet you’ve ever heard of (they all worked until I stopped doing them). Ditto health farms, slimming pills and hypnotism. Right now, I’m trying to resist some American online doctor who flogs herbal supplements that claim to reduce weight at the same time as fixing everything from anxiety and depression to acne, nausea and joint pain (none of which I have). I know he must be a shyster but the temptation will probably get me.

Letters: Let’s get fracking

Get fracking

Sir: All credit to The Spectator for grabbing the cancelled Tory leadership debate slot (‘The final three’, 23 July) and for quizzing the contenders on the massive cost of net zero. Rishi Sunak’s response was particularly disappointing. Here is a man who has financial acumen and who has spent his entire cabinet career in the Treasury. Yet he would have us believe that the offshore wind industry, whose biggest costs are incurred in erecting huge structures of steel, iron, plastic/resin and concrete, has somehow contrived to cut those costs by nearly three-quarters over a decade. Unfortunately strike prices around £40/MWh which have been obtained for some recent offshore wind projects are not a binding commitment on the successful bidders to deliver energy at that price. If Sunak does believe that offshore wind-turbine costs have been transformed, it raises the question of why, as chancellor, he did nothing to reduce the subsidies the industry extracts from consumers.

Liz Truss appears a little more willing to challenge the powerful renewables lobby. However there is still no sign that she is prepared to see wealthy green Tories run into the arms of the Lib Dems in exchange for earning the gratitude of the 84 per cent of Red Wall voters who are not prepared to pay more than £1,000 for a heat pump. Reducing obscenely high energy costs promises to be the biggest challenge for the new prime minister. It would be reassuring if Truss could start by apologising for the past two decades, during which our senior politicians prioritised grandstanding on climate change over our country’s energy security. She should then slam the brakes on net zero, commission an independent review of that policy’s genuine costs and benefits, and get fracking.

Richard North

Hayling Island, Hants

Transferable vote

Sir: Given that MPs have made such a hash of providing a choice of leader that reflects their Conservative constituents’ desire for a change in the guard, is there anything to stop Tory members from spoiling their ballots and writing ‘Kemi’ or ‘Penny’ on them?

Charlotte Black

Guildford

Leading the way

Sir: Thank you for Paul Collier’s interesting and surprisingly wide-ranging article (‘Prime example’, 23 July) on lessons we could learn from Singapore. Sir Paul successfully defines the pressing leadership needs of the present. A return to personal morality, self-sacrifice and instilling common purpose as the guiding principles of our political class – these are surely ingredients on which we can all agree.

Richard List

Aylesbury, Bucks

Stamping ground

Sir: Like Melanie McDonagh (Notes on letterheads, 16 July) my daughter, while head of a literature and creative writing programme at an international school, experienced the younger generation’s bewilderment around handwritten correspondence. Trying to civilise a class of competitive sports students, she had them exchanging newsy postcards with selected elderly persons in the community outside. At first they were completely puzzled by the whole process, and thought the small rectangular outline of a stamp at the top right-hand corner was intended for a photograph of themselves.

Lindsey Sandilands

Bude, Cornwall

Hot topic

Sir: In an otherwise sensible editorial (‘Reckless caution’, 23 July), you say: ‘No one seriously questions climate change, nor the idea human activity plays a role.’ Can I respectfully refer you to the evidence submitted by Professors Happer and Lindzen to the SEC in respect of their proposals on climate-change reporting? In it they concisely set out the arguments for why there is no reliable scientific evidence to justify what might be called the anthropogenic climate change ‘consensus’.

Mark Tyndall

Dunbar, East Lothian

The wolf of Badenoch

Sir: When Kemi Badenoch was first elected as an MP her surname rang a bell. Her husband’s Diary (23 July) prompts me to write. When I was young I took an interest in railway engines. One of Sir Nigel Gresley’s streamlined locomotives was named ‘Wolf of Badenoch’. The emergence of personal computers since that time has enabled me to discover that it was named after Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, called the ‘Wolf of Badenoch’, who was the third surviving son of King Robert II of Scotland.

J. Alan Smith

Epping, Essex

Made in Scotland

Sir: May I respectfully suggest to Hamish Badenoch that there is a third pronunciation of the word ‘Badenoch’? The natives of the district of that name in the Highlands of Scotland call it ‘Bade-noch’ (‘bade’ to rhyme with ‘made’). The family’s preferred pronunciation of their name is, of course, the one to be used. The name translates from the Gaelic as ‘the drowned land’.

Rosemarie Bromley

Cheltenham

Sharp practice

Sir: Susan Hill (‘Best medicine’, 16 July) brought to mind an incident when I was a child in the 1950s. I had a boil on the inside of my right knee. My father, a chemist, said with some glee, ‘I’ll sort that out!’ and lanced it with a cut-throat razor. I passed out; my mother didn’t speak to him for a week. The scar is still a visual aid to my retelling of the tale to all who will listen.

Peter Ashley

Slawston, Leicestershire

Write to us letters@spectator.co.uk

Portrait of the week: Sunak vs Truss, London dodges a blackout and 94st walrus capsizes boats

Home

In a television debate between the two contenders for the leadership of the Conservative party (and hence the prime ministership), Rishi Sunak said it would be irresponsible to put the country in even more debt by cutting taxes and Liz Truss said that the tax rises he approved would put Britain into a recession. Mr Sunak was criticised for interrupting. A later proposal he made to cut VAT when the price cap on energy bills rose above £3,000 only brought accusations of a U-turn. He agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Neil on Channel 4, but Ms Truss didn’t. Opinion polls put Ms Truss well ahead among Conservative voters; Labour voters preferred Mr Sunak. Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, made a speech favouring ‘growth, growth and growth’, in pursuit of which he would establish an Industrial Strategy Council to set out ‘national priorities that go beyond the political cycle’. Lord Trimble died aged 77. As the Ulster Unionist leader he was awarded the Nobel peace prize with John Hume, the SDLP leader, in 1998.

The Commons health and social care select committee, chaired by the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, said the National Health Service faced its worst workforce crisis. The percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus rose to one in 17 in England and one in 15 in Scotland (from one in 19 and one in 16 a week earlier), according to surveys by the Office for National Statistics. Deaths involving Covid in the United Kingdom had totalled more than 200,000 by June.

National Grid had paid £9,724 per megawatt hour, more than 50 times the typical price, to Belgium the day after the hottest day, to prevent London losing power. Talk turned to drought after the driest first half of the year since 1976. The M20 motorway was used for parking by lorries waiting to cross the Channel, leading to traffic jams of passengers’ cars on other roads lasting up to 20 hours. France was blamed for not supplying enough officers to stamp passports. Passengers were advised not to try to travel by train when the RMT went on strike again. The Commonwealth Games opened in Birmingham. The entire board of Cricket Scotland resigned the day before a report by the diversity group Plan4Sport on behalf of Sportscotland cited 448 examples of institutional racism. In the week to July 24, 610 migrants in small boats reached England from France, according to the Ministry of Defence. Rwanda said it had the capacity to accommodate only 200 Channel migrants if Britain sent any.

Abroad

Russia and Ukraine signed separate agreements in Istanbul, under the aegis of the UN, intended to guarantee the export of grain, on which millions in Africa depend to avoid starvation. Russia would not attack ports while shipments were in transit; Ukrainian vessels would guide cargo ships through mined waters; Turkey would inspect ships; Russian exports of grain and fertiliser via the Black Sea would also be facilitated. Hours after the agreements, Russia launched a missile attack on Odessa. Russia said it hit a ship and US-supplied anti-ship missiles. Ukraine said two of the four Russian missiles were destroyed in the air. After a ten-day maintenance break, Russia’s Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline was providing only 20 per cent of its normal supply to EU countries anxious to build up gas before the winter. Ukraine called it blackmail. EU countries agreed a voluntary 15 per cent reduction in gas use in the next seven months. A 94-stone female walrus called Freya capsized boats while attempting to bask in the sun in Oslo.

Mario Draghi’s resignation as prime minister was accepted by the President of Italy at the second time of asking, ending an 18-month coalition. In 24 hours Italy rescued 674 people and recovered five dead bodies from an overcrowded fishing boat off the coast of Calabria; another 522 rescued from 15 boats were brought to Lampedusa. Japan executed a 39-year-old man who killed seven people in Tokyo in 2008 during a stabbing rampage.

President Joe Biden of the United States, aged 79, continued to work despite contracting Covid. The EU approved a smallpox vaccine against monkeypox after the World Health Organisation declared it a global emergency. More than 200 people were killed in gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in ten days. The Pope toured Canada apologising for the ‘disastrous error’ of church personnel who worked in government-funded residential schools for indigenous people whom the state sought to assimilate. CSH

As cool and refreshing as a selection of sorbets: RA’s Milton Avery show reviewed

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much as he was prepared to say. Contemporary critics tried to ‘pin Matisse’ on him as if art criticism were a branch of police work. He resisted, and remains a slippery customer. Post-impressionist or abstract expressionist? Colour field painter with added figures? To those who view art history as the march of progress towards modernism, he looks like a backslider. Clement Greenberg thought as much, dismissing him in 1943 as ‘a “light” modern who can produce offspring of Marie Laurencin and Matisse that are empty and sweet with nice flat areas of colour…’ Ouch.

‘Light’ is a fair description of Avery’s work: light in tonality, in weight of paint and intellectual baggage. Not a product of the art school system, he assimilated rather than learned his trade. A working-class descendant of English immigrants, he worked in Connecticut factories from the age of 16 and fell into art almost by accident. The commercial lettering night class he had joined to improve his prospects was cancelled and he was transferred to life drawing by a sharp-eyed tutor. In some ways he remained a perpetual student, supported by his commercial illustrator wife after his move to New York aged 40 in 1925; he was 50 when her faith in him was rewarded with representation by a New York dealer. He kept up a factory rate of production regardless, sometimes finishing a canvas in a single day. He never knew the meaning of artist’s block, perhaps because he didn’t invent: however far removed from conventional representation his work appeared, it was rooted in reality. He painted from life.

The early Connecticut landscapes in the Royal Academy’s exhibition – the first European survey of Avery’s work – are impressionist paintings in the plein-air tradition dappled with colour. It was in New York, unable to paint in oils on the spot, that he started making watercolour sketches in situ and distilling their essence on to canvas back home. ‘I like to seize a sharp instant in nature, imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships to convey the ecstasy of the moment,’ he said. ‘To this end I eliminate and simplify, leaving nothing but colour and pattern.’ Watercolour encouraged simplification and its translucency lightened his oils. Eventually he was painting so thin as to merely stain the canvas in places, while buttering it in others with dabs and streaks suggesting mackerel skies or sun-dazzled seas. He boasted of making a tube of paint last longer than any other artist.

Rapid sketching allowed figures to enter his landscapes. A crush of day trippers clogs the background of ‘Coney Island’ (1931), ogling the bare flesh of the grandes baigneuses whose foreshortened legs project into our space: it’s a scene worthy of Edward Ardizzone, if not Donald McGill. Avery’s daughter March credits him with ‘a New England sense of humour’, but on this side of the pond it looks plain English. ‘In the Spotlight’ (c.1930s), with its nude exotic dancer glowing white and worm-like in the darkness of the auditorium, evokes the humour of an English working-class artist, James Fitton; and the Gaspé landscapes of the late 1930s refract French modernism through the same naive lens as the Brittany paintings of Christopher Wood. In America Avery was a fish out of water: ‘Either I’m crazy,’ he decided, ‘or everyone else is.’

Figures in intimate interiors became a staple, but summers were spent in places of natural beauty storing up landscape sketches to work from in winter. A major heart attack in 1949 hastened the trend towards simplification, clearing away clutter in favour of colour. In the late 1950s the septuagenarian artist was inspired by the wide-open beaches of Provincetown to scale up ‘like the abstract boys’, his younger friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb; emptied of everything but the odd beach blanket, these large paintings might be abstract without their titles. You look around for the boathouse in ‘Boathouse by the Sea’, 1959 (see below), until you realise you’re standing in its black shadow. No matter how abstracted his landscapes appear, Avery always puts you in the picture.

I left this show with a feeling of pure wellbeing. If Matisse’s art is a comfortable armchair, Avery’s is a sun-lounger; on a hot day his palate-cleansing palette of colours felt as cool and refreshing as a selection of sorbets. Faced by the Provincetown seascapes, even Greenberg ate his words. ‘If I failed to discern how much there was in these that was not Matisse,’ he recanted in 1957, ‘it was not only because of my own imperceptiveness, but also because the artist himself had not contrived to call enough attention to it.’ Avery wasn’t an attention seeker; in his daughter’s words: ‘He just wanted to paint.’

As good, and inventive, as modern rock music gets: Black Midi’s Hellfire reviewed

The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them, or because you actually enjoy the music they make? By which I mean when you’ve finished listening to them is it a sense of admiration which lingers in the mind, or are you captivated by one or another of their songs? Previously it has tended to be the former – and there is an awful lot to admire. If you add superlative musicianship to a certain witty and anarchic imagination, you end up with this rather deranged, occasionally irritating, millennial mash-up of styles, where jazz fusion meets post-punk, James Brown, Beefheart, clever prog and pretty much anything else which, however briefly, flits through the consciousness of their auteur, Geordie Greep.

Now, though, they have become grandly cinematic and even added a new weapon to their arsenal – propa songs. It is the tendency of all bands today to cleave towards the epic but Midi do this without the usual self-consciousness and only where it fits with the trajectory of the song. The staccato stabs of brass are still there, so too the jagged funk. But now we have tunes and Greep’s stream-of- consciousness lyricism has become a little more focused. There are some tales you can bear to hear and repeat, such as the hilarious swansong of a one-time star, ‘27 Questions’. There is even country, on the pedal steel-coated ‘Still’, even if there are one or two time signatures within that might not have commended themselves to, say, Hank Williams.

In short, this is about as good, and inventive, as modern rock music gets.

Convincing performances and unexpected sounds: Opera Holland Park’s Delius/Puccini double bill reviewed

Delius and Puccini: how’s that for an operatic odd couple? Delius, that most faded of British masters, now remembered largely as a purveyor of wistful aquarelles. And…well, and Puccini. Early, neglected Puccini, true, but this is Opera Holland Park, where they make it their mission to rescue the waifs and strays of Italian late romanticism, and see how they scrub up. Demonstrable dud by unfashionable Englishman vs youthful ambition from Italian opera’s ultimate marquee name. We all knew, in advance, how that was likely to play out.

And we were all wrong. It turns out that both Puccini’s Le Villi (1884) and Delius’s Margot la Rouge (1902) were written for the same long-running competition that gave us Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. A nice connection; more interesting is the way in which these one-acters, in angling for the prize, attempt something untypical of their composers and end up revealing what makes each man tick. Margot is a brief, brutal tale of the Parisian demi-monde, set to luminous music: in other words, English verismo. I honestly didn’t see that coming, any more than I’d previously clocked the curiously Germanic flavour of Puccini’s first opera – a dance-driven supernatural shocker, all waltz-songs and pale, lingering clarinets.

For OHP, Martin Lloyd-Evans sets both operas in the same revolving wooden shack, with Anne Sophie Duprels as the heroine of each. Peter Auty wrapped his no-nonsense tenor vigorously around Puccini’s love-rat hero Roberto, Paul Carey Jones projected sonorous menace as Delius’s murderous pimp L’Artiste and Samuel Sakker sounded suitably tender as his rival Thibault. They all orbited around Duprels, the reigning queen of these troubled, underperformed late 19th-century heroines – Mascagni’s Isabeau, Leoncavallo’s Zazà, Charpentier’s Louise. There’s a streak of acid in her voice; a tarnished edge that she uses to temper the prevailing sweetness, though she can certainly soar when she chooses. In Margot, she gradually thaws; in Le Villi she begins as a heartbroken bride and ends as an avenging spectre. Duprels is convincing all the way.

Sensibly, Lloyd-Evans plays both operas pretty much straight, with Francesco Cilluffo and the City of London Sinfonia sounding thoroughly inside both idioms. If Delius never quite finds the focus to create genuinely vivid musical personalities for his characters, it’s fascinating to hear him locate the one section that speaks to his nature – a love-duet drenched in nostalgia for a vanished happiness – and fly with it. Puccini, meanwhile, makes all the right moves, but not necessarily in the right dramatic order. A spoken narration explains that Roberto has yielded to ‘lewd excess’ with a ‘siren’, and that his abandoned bride has died of grief. A more experienced Puccini would get a whole opera out of that (it’s called Madama Butterfly). In Le Villi he cues the dancers, and the overall impression (as Gounod once put it) is all sauce but no fish. That’s no fault of the cast or company.

Since 1993, Bampton Classical Opera has been staging obscure 18th-century operas on the lawn of an Oxfordshire deanery. Literally: there’s no permanent theatre or even much by way of a temporary one. Audiences bring their own picnics and chairs and sit there in Gore-Tex and pac-a-macs, munching away throughout. (We were advised that the opera would move to the church if it rained, though I suspect it would have taken a Thames valley tsunami to shift this crowd.) An amplified announcement requested the relocation of a VW Polo, which was blocking a neighbour’s drive.

But there was nothing ad hoc about the performance of Fool Moon, aka Haydn’s Il mondo della luna. Haydn’s operas tend to wilt in the theatre, but as entertainment for a very English fête champêtre the bubbling absurdity of this Goldoni-based farce was ideal. Three pairs of young lovers convince the tyrannical patriarch Buonafede that he’s been transported to the moon: where, this being 1777, he immediately enquires about Lunar court etiquette. Haydn’s happy, endlessly generous score includes celestial minuets and an ensemble in moon language, as well as some entertainingly flashy arias, delivered with brio by a youthful cast and a pair of lively dancers.

Siân Dicker added just the lightest spritz of pathos as Flaminia while Jonathan Eyers maintained a gangly dignity as Buonafede, despite spending much of Act Two with a colander on his head. If anything, he was almost too genial to play the miser, though that, too, suited the prevailing atmosphere of good-natured lunacy – which extended from Gilly French’s witty and ingenious English translation (perfectly audible in the open air) to the surreal, Clangers-inspired sets by director-designer Jeremy Gray. The rain held off, the orchestra was buoyant, and it all ended happily around a colossal glowing cheese-grater. You probably had to be there but they’re repeating it next month at Westonbirt and in September at St John’s Smith Square, so you still can.

Allison Bailey and the trouble with Stonewall

When a pressure group moves from promoting the rights of a minority to trying to micromanage the behaviour of the majority, we should be worried. When large numbers of organisations in both the public and private sectors dance to the tune of that body, we should be more so. Stonewall is a case in point, if the evidence given at an employment tribunal case decided yesterday involving commendably pugnacious lesbian activist Allison Bailey is anything to go by.

Founded in 1989 as a gay equality campaign group, in recent years Stonewall has diversified into aggressively promoting trans activism. As an organisation, it has also become pretty rawly commercial. A good chunk of its income of over £8 million a year comes from encouraging organisations – for a substantial fee – to join it, use its logo to show their progressive credentials, and perhaps become so-called ‘diversity champions’.

About four years ago, Garden Court chambers, where Bailey worked, joined Stonewall’s scheme. Bailey strongly dissented. She attacked Stonewall’s practices, publicly tweeted her personal view that biological sex mattered more than any individual’s feeling of what gender they belonged to. As a counter-measure, Bailey helped found the LGB Alliance, a gender-critical gay campaign group that was (and is) anathema to Stonewall.

A nasty sniping campaign ensued. One internal email referred to applying ‘censorship’ to Bailey; people were encouraged to ‘express concern’ about Bailey to Garden Court over her behaviour and the transphobia inherent in it. A formal investigation into her followed.

Bailey had had enough. She sued her chambers for discriminating against her on the basis of her belief; she also added a claim against Stonewall for inducing them to do so. Yesterday her claim succeeded against the chambers and she recovered a substantial sum. Her belief was worthy of protection, and Garden Court had treated her worse on account of it. She failed against Stonewall, largely on the basis that there was no evidence of direct rather than passive encouragement, and that the Stonewall officials involved had generally been acting as independent activists rather than on behalf of the organisation.

There is much good news here. For some time it has been an uncomfortable fact that threats to free speech come increasingly not from the state but from private pressure groups and the efforts of public and private bodies to appease them. Stonewall’s champions programme itself, for example, requires member organisations to say they ‘will not tolerate discrimination or harassment of anyone based on their gender identity or expression,’ and ‘highlight specific examples of transphobia’. The latter of these, apparently, includes any instance of ‘speculating about someone’s gender’ or ‘ignoring someone’s preferred pronoun’. If Bailey’s victory shows that organisations that uncritically toe the Stonewall line are in danger of losing expensive lawsuits, we should rejoice. Having said this, however, there are two more serious points worth making.

First, although Stonewall technically won, it does not come well out of this debacle. Whether or not in law it instructed, caused or induced Garden Court’s campaign against Bailey, there is little doubt that, however well-meaningly, Stonewall exercised a thoroughly malign influence over that organisation. 

It’s worth remembering that Stonewall has form here. Last year, Essex university was forced into a humiliating apology after it prevented two eminent speakers with gender-critical views addressing groups there. It did so having previously relied on legal advice from Stonewall that an independent inquiry by barrister Akua Reindorf regarded as wrong.

The other worrying point concerns the legal profession, or at least part of it. Bailey’s chambers at Garden Court need to do some serious soul-searching. A set supposedly dedicated to human rights, freedom and the rights of the underdog, in this case it behaved like a faceless corporation concerned more about reputation management than individual liberty. 

At dinners in the Inns of Court, the Bar may be fond of promoting itself as a fiercely independent profession that encourages its members to act fearlessly and not allow themselves to be browbeaten. After the Allison Bailey episode, however, some of us may begin to wonder.