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The danger of Emma Raducanu’s ‘fixated’ fan ordeal
The scenes involving a tearful Emma Raducanu at the Dubai tennis championships must give pause for thought about the terrifying ordeals faced by women sports stars. Raducanu broke down in tears just two games into a second-round match against her opponent Karolina Muchova. The match had to be stopped after the former British No. 1 appeared to visibly panic, then began to cry, before approaching the umpire to ask for help.
In remarkable scenes, Raducanu then appeared to cower behind the umpire’s chair while a ‘fixated’ man was removed from the crowd. She was comforted during this time by the umpire and Muchova before play could resume.
Plenty of other women tennis stars have spoken publicly about the dangers of stalkers
It has now been revealed that on Monday – the day before the match – Raducanu, who has in the recent past attracted the attention of stalkers, had been approached in a public area by a man who exhibited what was described as ‘fixated behaviour’. The same individual was identified seated in the front rows when Raducanu’s second-round match got underway. There have also been reports that the tennis star was approached at her hotel on Monday by a stranger who wanted to give her a letter.
This form of unwanted and unwarranted attention is unfortunately becoming the norm for many elite women athletes. Obsessive ‘fans’ routinely watch their every move, and try to accost them in public spaces or while travelling to tournaments. Raducanu, a global superstar from the age of 18, attracts more attention than most.
The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) issued a statement confirming that the man was removed from the arena and will be banned from all future WTA events, pending a ‘threat assessment’. The association said: ‘Player safety is our top priority, and tournaments are advised on security best practices for international sporting events.’
Raducanu, who is now back home in the UK, posted a statement on social media thanking people for their messages of support, adding: ‘Difficult experience yesterday, but I’ll be okay and proud of how I came back and competed despite what happened at the start of the match.’ It is certainly the case that she showed remarkable fortitude and resilience in going on to finish the match, which she eventually lost 7-6, 6-4. Few would have blamed her if she had abandoned it altogether after what had happened. She remains a fierce competitor to the last, as is to be expected from an elite athlete.
The tennis star’s experience in Dubai has highlighted once again the broader issues around safety that female tennis players, in particular, can face. Raducanu has been targeted before. A man was found guilty in 2022 of stalking the star after visiting her home on three separate occasions and leaving unwanted gifts and flowers. He received a five-year restraining order. Raducanu later admitted that the experience had left her constantly ‘looking over her shoulder’ and feeling as if her ‘freedom had been taken away’. Much has been made in recent years of the 22-year-old’s failure to reach the triumphant heights she managed at the US Open but the scenes in Dubai prompt the question: how is someone so young expected to cope with such safety worries yet somehow block everything out when a tournament begins?
Plenty of other women tennis stars have spoken publicly about the dangers of stalkers following them around, either in person or through social media. The current British No. 1 Katie Boulter revealed last year that she had been followed a number of times. On one occasion, a stalker followed her while she was out with her boyfriend. The Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, were also targeted by stalkers. The most shocking stalker incident of all saw Monica Seles stabbed by a man fixated on her rival Steffi Graf during a match in 1993. Her attacker, Gunter Parche, walked on to court and plunged a knife between her shoulder blades. He told police he did so because he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone beating Graf.
The latest disturbing incident involving Raducanu demonstrates all too well that the threat to tennis players is real enough. It is still far too easy to get close to players at some of the smaller events on the tennis tour. The warning lights are flashing red.
The Trump-Zelensky train wreck will cost Ukraine dearly
Where did it all go wrong between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky? Just a week ago, Zelensky was speaking of his ‘respect’ and ‘friendship’ for Trump and of his hope that the new US administration would ‘stand by Ukraine … to make a just and lasting peace’. Yet in the course of just 24 hours, the Trump-Zelensky relationship spiralled into a nose-dive before definitively crashing and burning with a devastatingly vicious post by the US President on his Truth Social media platform.
In an incoherent and error-filled statement, Trump blasted Zelensky as ‘a dictator without elections’, a ‘modestly successful comedian’ who had ‘talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion dollars, to go into a war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start’. Trump accused Zelensky of ‘playing Biden like a fiddle’ in order to extract money – and, perhaps most outrageously of all, accused Zelensky of putting off peace talks with Putin because he ‘probably wants to keep the gravy train going’.
Trump’s savage attack on a close American ally has no precedent in the modern history
Trump’s ally Elon Musk was quick to pile in behind the President’s criticisms of Zelensky’s legitimacy. ‘Given that we are supposed to be defending democracy, there should be democracy,’ Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, which he owns. ‘Zelensky cannot claim to represent the will of the people of Ukraine unless he restores freedom of the press and stops canceling elections!’
Trump’s savage attack on a close American ally has no precedent in the modern history of diplomacy and has drawn shock and disbelief from across the US political spectrum – as well as from Europe. ‘Trump’s characterisations of Zelensky and Ukraine are some of the most shameful remarks ever made by a US president,’ wrote John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019. ‘Our support of Ukraine has never been about charity, our way of life at home depends on our strength abroad.’
Trump’s 230-word-long post was unusually aggressive, intemperate and reckless even by his own extravagant standards. They were the words of a clearly angry man who has been personally offended. Trump’s vice president J.D. Vance confirmed that his boss’ outburst was a direct, personal response to Zelensky’s behaviour.
Over the past week, Zelensky has publicly expressed indignation that he had not been invited to US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, announcing that he would be flying to Riyadh anyway – before scrapping that plan and declaring that Ukraine would not necessarily abide by any peace deal agreed between Trump and Putin in upcoming face-to-face talks. Zelensky also accused Trump of living in a ‘bubble of Russian disinformation’. That, while quite possibly true, was apparently the final straw.
‘The idea that [Zelensky] is going to litigate his disagreements with the President in the public square … This is not a good way to deal with President Trump,’ Vance told reporters. Zelensky had attacked ‘the only reason [his] country exists, publicly … And it’s disgraceful,’ said Vance. ‘And it’s not something that is going to move the President of the United States. In fact, it’s going to have the opposite effect.’
Vance’s diagnosis rings true. Trump has thrown years of US diplomacy and billions of dollars (though not the $350 billion he claimed) to the wind in a fit of personal pique. Zelensky had dared to challenge Trump over his plan to bring a swift end to the war by striking a direct deal with Putin, and, even more outrageously to Trump’s mind, suggested that Ukraine might refuse to comply. The result was diplomatic armageddon by social media.
Doubtless, many previous US presidents have been choleric and vengeful men (Richard Nixon springs to mind). But none before Trump has had the technological means to communicate his spontaneous thoughts, unmediated, to millions at the touch of a button – and change the balance of power in the world as a result.
For three years since Putin’s invasion, Zelensky has barely put a foot wrong in his international diplomacy. In a series of passionate speeches to the British and European parliaments, Congress, and other national assemblies at the beginning of the war, Zelensky’s moral clarity and personal example of bravery drew standing ovations. It inspired – and occasionally shamed – Western nations into sending massive and unprecedented military and other aid.
But managing Trump was always going to be Zelensky’s trickiest – as well as most consequential – personal challenge. The two leaders go back a long way. In the now infamous ‘quid pro quo’ phone call during the first months of Zelensky’s presidency in 2019, Trump seemed to demand dirt on Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business activities in exchange for continued US military aid. Zelensky politely refused. That episode became the basis of Trump’s second impeachment in the closing days of his first term.
During the 2024 US presidential campaign, Zelensky made his preference for a Biden victory a little too obvious, ill-advisedly touring arms factories in Pennsylvania to demonstrate that support for Ukraine was good business for America’s military-industrial complex. Trump’s team didn’t appreciate the gesture. But Zelensky’s final, and fatal, miscalculation was to imagine that gathering European support for his defiance of Trump would put him in a strong position. The opposite was true. Zelensky, maestro of the political high-wire, this week mis-stepped into empty space.
Identifying a diplomatic bad move is not the same as blaming the victim. Zelensky has fallen foul of a vengeful and thin-skinned man who has long been itching for an excuse to settle old scores.
But the sad reality is that Ukraine will suffer for this debacle, which hands Putin a victory he could not possibly have dreamed of even a week ago. The Kremlin has long said that it regards Zelensky – whose presidential term expired in May 2024 and who has been ruling under wartime emergency powers ever since – as an illegitimate president. Trump’s blast will be music to their ears.
On a practical level, by signalling that he regards Zelensky as a ‘dictator’, Trump has effectively signalled that there will be no deal until new elections are held in Ukraine – elections which Zelensky is, according to recent polling that shows just 16 per cent of people are willing to vote for his return, almost certain to lose.
The idea of a massive pro-Zelensky sympathy vote in the wake of Trump’s evisceration makes for a cute narrative – but the danger is that in practice a Ukrainian leader who has lost the confidence of the country’s major ally and supporter could struggle for political survival. It will be up to his likely successor and current overwhelming poll-leader General Valery Zaluzhny – currently Ukraine’s ambassador to London – to rebuild the shattered relationship.
Does Trump want to strike an Arctic oil deal with Putin?
The decision by Donald Trump to hold peace talks with Russia on ending the Ukraine war – without Ukraine actually being present – is starting to look even more disgraceful. It transpires that the war was not the only item on the agenda in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
A significant part of the day’s business seems to have been discussing oil deals in the Arctic. According to Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the Russian and US delegations took the opportunity to talk about reviving joint exploratory operations such as that between Rosneft and Exxon Mobil, which was called off in 2018 following the imposition of sanctions against Putin. Trump was in his first presidency at the time.
There are good reasons why the US and Russia should want to cooperate over Arctic oil and gas
Putin himself also seems to see the talks over Ukraine as an opportunity to do business. The location of Saudi Arabia, it appears, may not have been accidental: Putin has proposed three-way negotiations between Russia, the US and Saudi Arabia over energy policy.
Trump, then, was not mincing his words when he promised in his inauguration speech always to put the US first. Indeed, he might have said that the interests of the US were going to be his sole concern. And if advancing America’s business interests means trampling on Ukraine, calling Volodymyr Zelensky a ‘dictator’, and making business deals with a regime which has not only invaded a sovereign country but also waged chemical warfare on Britain’s streets then so be it.
Trump’s treatment of Ukraine is losing him friends among Europeans who might otherwise be well-disposed towards him and his ambitions to expand America’s oil and gas industries. But if you can look beyond the amorality of that, does doing oil deals with Russia in the Arctic even make business sense?
There is unquestionably huge potential in the Arctic’s fossil fuel reserves. According to an estimate by the US geological survey a decade ago, 22 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie in the Arctic region. The trouble for Trump is that most of it – 58 per cent – belongs to Russia, with only 18 per cent to be found in Alaska and US waters. Geology seems to favour Russia, too, when it comes to reserves beyond the 200-mile territorial waters boundary. Under international rules, a country can claim reserves further offshore where the continental shelf extends beyond this distance.
Russia, though, has limited capacity for and skill in extracting oil and gas in the difficult environment. Meanwhile, the US has another problem in that the pipeline carrying oil from Alaska’s main onshore field at Prudhoe Bay requires a high throughput to keep it operational. If the quantity of oil flowing through it falls too low it could suffer ice damage. To keep it operational as Prudhoe Bay declines will require it to be fed with oil from other Arctic fields.
There are, then, good reasons why the US and Russia should want to cooperate over oil and gas in the Arctic. Indeed, they were cooperating before sanctions were imposed following the annexation of Crimea. There is also a case for saying that Trump is right to pursue a peace deal with Ukraine – given that the likely outcome of a continuing war of attrition is total defeat for Ukraine.
But the juxtaposition of these two things reeks of opportunism and lack of principle. Trump might not care about that, and may have calculated that Russia is of more value to the US than any other European country. He should remember, though, that there was a time when he rightly criticised Germany for building a reliance on cheap Russian gas, approving the Nord Stream 2 pipeline even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He has now descended to an even grubbier level himself.
A crackdown on lying in politics could backfire
How do you know a politician is lying? Their lips are moving. We’ve all heard the joke. Even in these horribly divided times, there’s one belief that still unites the fractured British public: politicians can’t be trusted. So a plan hatched in Wales last summer to make lying in politics a criminal offence has proved popular, but not among the Welsh parliament’s standards committee, which warned against the idea this week.
“Our view is that the risks and the unintended consequences currently outweigh the benefits,” the committee said. Its report suggested that, given the “considerable existing strain on the justice system”, it would be wrong to put more pressure on the courts – quite the illustration of how regularly politicians are thought to lie.
It does feel like politics is getting more dishonest. During Donald Trump’s first term, the Washington Post counted 30,573 lies from the man — an average of 21 porkies for every day he was in office. Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, Boris Johnson was regularly accused of fibbing during his time as prime minister. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has faced accusations that she embellished the truth on her CV.
No one likes being deceived by people in power, but I agree with the Welsh committee: on balance it would be wrong to make lying in politics a criminal offence. The first issue is that it would be really hard to secure convictions. You’d have to prove the politician lied – that they did so deliberately – and do we really think it’s beyond a crooked MP’s wit to mislead us into thinking they didn’t realise they were misleading us?
It would also be hard to establish who was responsible for any given deception. When politicians speak in parliament or to the media, they’ve normally been briefed by a civil servant or other adviser. Team members usually write politicians’ speeches and articles for them. Would it be feasible to expect every politician to fact check every statement before they make it?
In fact, it might be difficult to prove that an MP lied at all because their statements are often shrouded in sneaky wordplay, or hair-splitting definitions, which they can later use to claim they didn’t really lie.
Bill Clinton strongly denied having “sexual relations with that women” and later defended himself by arguing colourfully about what “sexual relations” meant. Did Michael Howard “threaten to overrule” the head of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis?
“I didn’t overrule him,” demurred the former home secretary, however many times Jeremy Paxman asked him.
Last year, Labour cabinet minister Lisa Nandy was found to have been loaned clothing from a luxury fashion agency one day before she’d insisted on Sky News that she had never accepted free clothes from donors. It was just a loan, you see.
Supporters of criminalising political dishonesty point to collapsing public trust but I think their plan would only make it worse. The public is already convinced that the system is rigged in favour of politicians and that political crooks are never held to account. How many failed prosecutions of lying MPs would it take before distrust deepened?
It’s easy to imagine that some dodgy people would welcome the plan with open arms. Criminalising lies in politics would be manna from heaven for any populist grifter in Westminster. They’d play the system like a fiddle: deliberately say something untrue, get themselves charged and taken to court, leverage the whole thing to whip their supporters into a frenzy and end up getting let off anyway.
It would also be an open goal for any wealthy person or company that wants to silence discussion on themselves or a particular issue. Just as rich crooks threaten libel writs against anyone who tries to hold them to account, the same intimidation tactic could be used here. If you accuse someone of lying when it’s a criminal offence to lie you’ll shut up a fair few of them.
Look, I can only think of a handful of politicians of any party I wouldn’t absolutely love to see dragged through the courts. I too am exhausted by the mendacities of the Commons. But making lying in politics a criminal offence would be futile and open to abuse – and then that stench of BS would only get stronger.
Good Keymer
Freestyle Chess (also known as Fischer-Random, Chess960, or Chess9LX), is the variant in which pieces on the back row are shuffled in one of 960 configurations at the start of the game. Until now, it has been regarded as a novelty. Standard chess offers a great starting position, in that there are countless ways to develop harmony between the pieces. But elite players have studied this phase in depth, and it is rare that they face any truly novel problems in the opening phase.
Freestyle Chess is arguably a more stringent test of skill than the standard game, because players cannot rely on their memory. Even for elite players, the first few moves require deep thought, and it is fascinating to watch them striving to coordinate their jumbled pieces.
The first event in the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam series, held at the Weissenhaus luxury resort near Hamburg, had a surprise winner in the young German grandmaster Vincent Keymer, who defeated Carlsen in the semifinal (see below) and Caruana in the final.
The game below had as its start position: Na1, Bb1, Rc1, Kd1, Be1, Rf1, Qg1, Nh1. Black’s setup mirrors that: Na8, Bb8, Rc8, etc.
Vincent Keymer-Magnus Carlsen
Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, Weissenhaus, 2025
1 g4 Ng6 2 Nb3 e5 3 Ng3 The cheeky 3 Nc5 (or 3 Na5) already comes into consideration, but Black could respond by castling queenside (!) – see the note to the fourth move. f6 4 c4 O-O-O Freestyle castling rules are peculiar. Here, the Black king moves from d8 to c8 and the rook moves from c8 to d8, i.e. they simply swap places. 5 d4 Nb6 6 d5 d6 7 Bf5+ Bd7 8 f3 a6 9 e4 Nf4 10 Bxd7+ Rxd7 11 Kc2 If Keymer had castled queenside, swapping the places of the king and rook just as Carlsen did on move 4, 11…Nxc4 was a good response. 11…Ba7 Carlsen probably refrained from 11…Nxc4 on the grounds that 12 Kb1 Nb6 13 Qxb6 uses the c-file pin to win the knight. But in fact 12 Kb1 could be met by Nh3!, with a possible repetition after 13 Qg2 Nf4 14 Qg1 etc. 12 Bd2 Kb8 13 Be3 Nh3 14 Qg2 Nf4 15 Qf2 h5 16 Rfd1 hxg4 17 fxg4 Nc8 18 c5 dxc5 19 Bxc5 g6 20 Bxa7+ Nxa7 21 Kb1 At last, Keymer has achieved a harmonious position, and looks toward the queenside to develop his initiative. Qh7 22 Nc5 Rd6 23 Ne2 Nxe2 24 Qxe2 Nb5 25 Qc4 Rc8 26 a4 Nd4 27 g5! The point is that 27…fxg5 meets a strong response in 28 Rxd4! exd4 29 e5 when the pawn duo confers a powerful initiative, e.g. 29…Rb6 30 d6! cxd6 31 Nxa6+ Rxa6 32 Qxc8+ Ka7 33 Rc7! and wins. 27…Rcd8 28 gxf6 Rxf6 29 Rf1 Rb6 30 Rf2 g5 31 Ka2 Ka7 32 Rcf1 g4 33 Qc3? A missed opportunity. 33 Rf7 suggests itself, but 33…Qxh2 threatens mate on b2, and the initial impression is that White has no follow-up after 34 R1f2 Qh4. But 35 Rxc7! is strong, when 35…Qxf2 gives rise to the position in this week’s puzzle. Nf3 34 Rg2 Rg8 35 Rff2 Rd6 36 Qe3 Ka8 37 Ne6 c6? (see diagram) Carlsen’s attempt to undermine the powerful knight on e6 backfires. 38 Qa3! Keen tactics from Keymer. Strangely, there is no reasonable way to defend the rook; 38…Qe7 39 Rxf3 wins due to the pin on the g-file, while 38…Rd7 39 Nf8! forks queen and rook. 38…Qxe4 doesn’t help either, as after 39 Qxd6 Qxa4+ 40 Qa3 the checks soon run out. Rxe6 39 dxe6 Rc8 Black resigns as 40 Rxg4 Nd4 41 Rf8 wins easily.
No. 838
White to play. A variation from Keymer-Carlsen, Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, Weissenhaus 2025. Which move allows White to conclude the attack? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 24 February. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Re8+ Rxe8 2 Qxd6 wins the queen. The game went 1…Kh7 2 Qxd8 and Black resigned a few moves later.
Last week’s winner Malcolm Belt, Exmouth
Spectator Competition: Big bash
In Comp. 3387, for the centenary of the publication of The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway, you were invited to submit a passage in which one goes to the other’s party. It was especially hard to whittle this one down. Deserving a mention: Mrs D.’s West Egg dream by Brian Murdoch (‘“Sod the temporal perspective and narrative shifts,” she thought, “I need a nap”’) and Basil Ransome-Davies’s rendering of stream of consciousness (‘newspaper vendors at Piccadilly Circus, pigeons marooned in roof space, university architects, pistachio ice cream in a Viennese café… What made her wonder if Mr Carraway was Mr Gatsby’s petit ami like that mad young French poet?’); also Sue Pickard, Sylvia Fairley, Joseph Houlihan and others. The £25 vouchers go to those below.
‘Mrs Dalloway, old boy.’ Thus addressed, Clarissa wondered why she had ever invited Gatsby to her party. He exhibited the lethal innocence of all Americans, standing by and almost disappearing into her voluminous yellow curtains in a suit more appropriate to the Riviera, drinking Tokay as if it were root beer and seeming constantly on the verge of saying ‘Gee willikers’ to the Prime Minister. His conversation proved gauche, its dual preoccupations money, most of which he seemed proud to have amassed, and a girl named Daisy, the apparent toast of somewhere named East Egg. Lady Bruton, shooting Clarissa the sort of desperate and critical look a stricken battleship might direct to its fleet, declared herself charmed. It would have been better, Clarissa reflected regretfully, if there had been dancing.
‘I wanted to say how much I admire your flowers,’ Gatsby said. Reassuring flattery, Clarissa remembered, invariably justified an invitation.
Adrian Fry
What a lark! What a plunge! Clarissa Dalloway, suspended in Westminster most of her life, found America, Mr Gatsby, his companions – and, heavens, those motor cars! – positively charming. Good Lord, the party! All sparkles, laughter, plunging, swimming – the noise! ‘Sign of a successful party, ma’am.’ Before her Mr Gatsby himself. ‘Enchanted to make your acquaintance, sir.’ Did he have such a thing as a toasted crumpet, she breathed, surveying the sequinned swirl of startling skirts well above the ankles, feather boas, headbands, necklaces, cigarette-holders. Was it becoming? Was it decent? Then, what dancing! I had meant to have dancing, she brooded. A thousand pities that I had no dancing. All kicks, flicks, taps, flaps, heel-heel… What is that strange, eerie light? ‘I should like to visit the lighthouse, Mr Gatsby. Is there an omnibus, a tube…?’ Is there a God? ‘Don’t worry, ma’am, Daisy’ll drive you…’ For there she was.
David Silverman
I never fully understood the connection with Richard Dalloway; there was some allusion to the Buccleuch story but when my father learned of Gatsby’s request that I accompany him to London ‘for old times, old sport’, he insisted I look up this old acquaintance. The letter of introduction was evidently accepted, an invitation proffered, and it was with some anticipation that Gatsby and I approached the house in Barton Street that June Wednesday evening. The gathering was already lively when we arrived.
‘How delightful to see you!’ declared our hostess. Gatsby murmured something fitting but he passed by the trays of champagne and the din raised by the guests: confined, they glittered, but more greyly than those at his own parties and here he had no purpose and nowhere for escape. I recognised the bewilderment on his face. ‘I say, old sport,’ I heard his whisper, ‘shall we move along?’
W.H. Thomas
Mrs Dalloway said she would try the cocktails herself. There were liquors and cordials and Imperial Tokay. She often went into the bar and got from her drinks a peace which men and women never gave her. The party was bellow and uproar; Long Island Sound, a blue lawn, this moment of the Jazz Age. Sally Seton, now Lady Rosseter, was dancing in the fountain, swooning playfully into the Prime Minister’s arms, as naked as she had been at 18, when she had run for her sponge bag. Oh! a burst of jazz from the garden outside! A yellow car; a face of the very greatest importance. A breath of bootlegger alcohol. There was no doubt that Gatsby was seated within, the enduring symbol of the corrupt American Dream. The party was a success. But it was still touch and go, Clarissa thought. Such careless people.
Janine Beacham
But where on earth was Mr Gatsby? It bothered her, to sense this vacancy. There were guests: bright, youthful, the colours of citrus fruit, of sweet peas, all in motion, liquid, to the sensuous strains of an orchestra. They were all freshly laundered; sparkling like silver delphiniums; fragile; set against deciduous foliage, quite green; but dying, too, possessed with that unreal energy of cheap bouquets. Somehow, it was terrible; extraordinary; they were like tissue paper, she thought. And yet, no host! no one, it seemed, to greet, to express the million platitudes necessary upon a night like this. The music, so much gossip, overwhelmed her, fascinated her. Was that Mr Gatsby in the corner, smoking a cigarette? Listening; gazing at the crowd, as if they were gleaming ranks of carnations squashed together; was that him? ‘I am Clarissa,’ she said, more to herself than to him, and held out her hand.
Bill Greenwell
‘Yes, my party is definitely a success,’ Mrs Dalloway decided; but then she saw a restless-looking young man, standing awkwardly alone. ‘I’m so glad you could come to my party,’ she said.
‘It’s a swell do,’ he answered morosely.
‘You sound American?’
‘I am. Actually…’ He hesitated, as though about to confide something significant. ‘To be frank, I’m a symbol of the shallowness of success in post-war America.’
‘How interesting that must be!’
‘Are you symbolic too?’
‘Oh no,’ said Clarissa firmly, with a quiet pride. ‘Not symbolic at all. Mrs Woolf wouldn’t do that. I am nothing but a vibrantly living consciousness, whose sensations and memories create a vivid response to the world around me.’
‘Nice work if you can get it, old sport,’ he said. ‘But I reckon I throw livelier parties.’
George Simmers
No. 3390: Contrarian song
‘Whatever it is, I’m against it,’ sang Groucho Marx. You’re invited to be more specific. Please email entries (16 lines maximum) to competition@spectator.co.uk by 5 March.
2691: Very large fellow
The title wrote three unclued lights (one of two words) with the letter-count (3,8,6,4), whose members are the other unclued lights (two pairs, another of two words and a singleton). Solvers must highlight the singleton’s missing moniker hidden in the completed grid.
Across
11 Half the beans initially seem superfluous accompanying hot paste with chillis (7)
12 Seashore grass blowing back and forth (6)
14 Just a moment for A. Lloyd Webber’s collaborator (5)
16 Less convincing Debussy composition (2,3)
19 Poor actor’s part as expressed on picnic menu (3,4)
23 Leading academic’s endless nonsense on fish (7)
24 Raw sea-mist outside of hangar (4)
25 Figure runs home not quite ahead of coach (7)
30 President owns one hot motorbike (7)
31 Verse omitted from cover song (4)
32 Those with issues to deal with (7)
34 Further elements of primordial soup (4)
35 Termini re-designed for the time being (7)
40 Trembled having small stroke (5)
41 More attractive espalier reinstalled around top of hedge (9)
43 Like a gas, perhaps, one used as a weapon of war (7)
44 Take note before salutes overwhelm elite soldiers (5,6)
Down
2 Composer left a trifle (6)
3 It shows the spectrum in Capri smithy (5)
5 Isaac’s son represented in French art with gold base (4)
6 Restraining order from gas board (4)
7 Double-sided 25 in Sheffield theatre (7)
8 Food supplier putting Felix, possibly, before Rex? (7)
9 French standard rifle – ammo ordered (9)
10 True to life, fine and true (7)
15 Ship, possibly a drifter (5)
17 Most of the cash placed on 29’s hypothetical organism (7)
20 The French make clothes wet, it seems – here? (7)
22 Between high and low tidemarks – certainly, it’s said (9)
26 Blackbird from river and lake (5)
27 Match-maker? (7)
28 Act as an omen when poor Ben Stokes loses two bob (7)
33 Article found on board cruise ship following a straight path (6)
36 Head of government in control when in office? (5)
38 Slip top off in vaulted niche (4)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of a £30 John Lewis voucher and two runners-up prizes of £20 vouchers for the first correct solutions opened on 10 March. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2691, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP.
2688: 4 + 4 = 8 – solution
The unclued four-letter solutions are paired, one inside the other, to yield the four unclued 8-letter words: 37 ÷ 19 = 3, 15 ÷ 6 = 23, 21 ÷ 8 = 40 and 31D ÷ 38 = 44.
First prize R.A. Towle, Ilkeston, Derbyshire
Runners-up R.B. Briercliffe, Onchan, Isle of Man; Roger Cairns, Chalfont Heights, Bucks
Portrait of the week: US and Russia talk, Chiltern Firehouse burns and Duchess of Sussex rebrands
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Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that, to guarantee the security of Ukraine, he was ‘ready and willing’ to put ‘our own troops on the ground if necessary. I do not say that lightly’. Parliament would be allowed a vote on such a deployment, the government said. Earlier, Sir Keir took an unannounced telephone call from President Donald Trump of America about their forthcoming meeting. Afterwards, Mr Trump said: ‘We have a lot of good things going on. But he asked to come and see me and I just accepted his asking.’ The Chiltern Firehouse hotel in Marylebone burnt down.
The Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said she was ‘deeply troubled’ by comments made by Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch at Prime Minister’s Questions over a judge’s ruling in an immigration case, which allowed a Palestinian family into Britain though they had originally applied under an arrangement for Ukrainians. In the week to 17 February, 339 migrants arrived in small boats; one died in a swamped boat off Calais. Scottish jails began to release 390 prisoners early in the face of overcrowding. A 32-storey tower being built at 85 Gracechurch Street in the City of London will be modified to display underground remains of the Roman basilica discovered there.
The annual rate of inflation rose to 3 per cent in January, from 2.5 per cent a month earlier. The annual rate of pay rises in the last quarter of 2024 was 2.5 per cent, after inflation, according to the Office for National Statistics. Thames Water, which supplies about a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom, was offered loans of £3 billion at 9.75 per cent interest to allow it time for restructuring in the face of debts of £17 billion. The Duchess of Sussex announced a new name for her lifestyle brand of jam and things: As Ever. Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s press secretary, died aged 97.
Abroad
The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, held talks in Saudi Arabia about Ukraine. Ukraine was not invited and nor were European powers. Afterwards, Mr Trump said of Ukraine: ‘You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.’ Mr Lavrov said after the talks that Russia would not accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine: ‘Any appearance by armed forces under some other flag does not change anything.’ The talks followed a telephone conversation between President Trump and President Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump spoke afterwards to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who said later: ‘We will never accept deals made behind our back without our involvement.’ At a summit of European leaders on Ukraine in Paris, Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, said that discussing sending troops to Ukraine was ‘completely premature’. Earlier, at the Munich Security Conference, J.D. Vance, the Vice-President of America, had made a speech. He said: ‘The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China or any other external actor – what I worry about is the threat from within.’ He said that ‘our very dear friends, the United Kingdom’ had ‘placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs’.
Hamas released another three Israeli hostages in exchange for 369 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. A woman of 37 and her two-year-old daughter died after a car was driven into a crowd in Munich, injuring at least 37 people; police arrested the driver, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. A 14-year-old boy was killed and five people seriously wounded in a knife attack in Austria; police arrested a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker. A British couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, whose arrest in Iran in January has only now come to light, were charged with espionage.
M23 rebels (backed by Rwanda) took Bukavu, the second-largest city in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo after Goma, which fell in January. The board of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, officially rejected Elon Musk’s offer of $97.4 billion. South Korea accused the new Chinese AI company DeepSeek of sharing users’ data with the owner of TikTok in China. Meta announced plans to build a 31,000-mile undersea cable round the world from the east coast of the United States via Brazil, South Africa, India and Australia to the west coast of the United States. An aeroplane carrying 80 people skidded at Toronto airport and turned over on to its roof; no one was killed. The Pope, in hospital, developed pneumonia in both lungs. CSH
The secrets of the perfect potato rösti
You may be forgiven, if you are a regular reader of this column, for thinking that my primary motivation in cooking is showing off. I’m always banging on about lovely dishes you can serve to unsuspecting guests that will guarantee plaudits and amazement. But while there is more than a kernel of truth in this, I think that it’s actually simpler than that: what I crave from cooking is satisfaction. And I don’t mean satiation of hunger (although that too: I am greedy), but the sense of achievement that cooking – almost – invariably brings.
True, this achievement can often be found in presenting a beautiful cake to an assembled group of people, or your new friend saying ‘You know, I think these are the best brownies I’ve ever tried’. But it can also be a solitary satisfaction that isn’t quite so bound up with flaunting your bakes.
I love cooking the most when I successfully bring together a carbonara sauce, or feel the weight of a curd thicken in the pan; when I pound out a piece of meat to an impossible breadth and thinness for schnitzel, or hear the confident hiss as I add wine to a burgeoning risotto. The moment when a Swiss meringue transforms from a soupy mess to a glossy, rich buttercream is just as celebratory as flaming a brandy-soaked Christmas pudding in front of your family.
Unless you’re on MasterChef (or have a very keen three-year-old sous chef, like I sometimes do), you’re unlikely to be watched or held accountable during these kitchen moments. They’re just part of the process, rather than the end product. But they are what makes cooking so irresistible, even when I’m tired or grumpy.
Cooking potato rösti falls into this camp for me. A rösti – a proper, full-size, frying pan-wide rösti, none of these canapé one-bite imitators – requires flipping halfway through, so that it fries and crisps on the outside, leaving the inside fluffy and soft. It isn’t hard, although there is a knack to it, and when you get it right, the culinary satisfaction is unparalleled. I get the same glee from turning out a potato rösti as I do the most towering of soufflés or perfect of puddings.
The crucial rösti flip moment is less of a pancake toss and more of a confident invert, but there are a couple of tricks to getting it right. Don’t turn it over on to a plate: you need to get this enormous, half-cooked potato cake back into the pan in one piece, and curved sides are not your friend here. Turn it on to a large board, and then shimmy it back into the pan. Don’t worry if it drifts a little – you can neaten it all up with a spatula once it’s back in place.
And while we’re talking tips, here are a few rösti don’ts. Don’t panic when you see how much potato is produced – it’s going to cook down, I promise. Don’t squeeze the potato too thoroughly after grating: you need some of the natural potato water to steam the inside of the rösti to give you the perfect balance of soft interior and golden fried exterior. And don’t bother parboiling the potatoes – it’s the strand texture which makes a rösti a rösti, rather than a mashed potato cake.
Rösti is the perfect blank canvas for any topping you fancy (or can rustle up from the fridge): pickles, cured meats, tinned fish, frazzled brassicas, a fried egg, or just a splodge of sour cream and drizzle of hot sauce. But my favourite way to serve it is with a fat swoop of crème fraiche, and waves of smoked salmon piled on top and maybe, if I’m feeling fancy, some feathers of dill.
Serves 4
Takes 30 minutes
For the potato mix
- 750g Maris Piper or King Edward potatoes
- 15g butter
For cooking
- 30g butter
- 1 tbsp neutral oil
- 1 tbsp flaky salt
- Grate the potatoes (no need to peel) on the coarse holes of a box grater. Squeeze handfuls of the grated potatoes to remove most of the liquid.
- Melt the first 15g of butter, and stir it through the grated potatoes.
- Heat the remaining butter and oil in a heavy-based skillet about 20cm wide. Once the butter is melted, add the potato. Don’t squash it down, it needs to be able to steam a little – and don’t panic, it will look like loads, but it will cook down.
- Cook for 15 minutes, then slide a spatula around and underneath the edges of the rösti to ensure that it’s not stuck. Place a heat-proof board over the pan, holding both pan and board tightly, and flip, lifting the pan away.
- Slide the rösti back into the pan and cook the second side for 15 minutes.
- Turn out of the pan, and sprinkle generously with flaky salt.
How far-right might Germany go?
Lisa Haseldine has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In the Thuringian city of Weimar, opposite the theatre where the National Assembly hashed out Germany’s constitution in 1918, stands the museum of the history of the Weimar Republic. ‘A spectre is rising in Europe – the spectre of populism,’ a plaque reads. ‘Forces long thought overcome seem to be returning to threaten the basis of democracy. The Weimar Republic and its neighbours knew the phenomenon only too well.’
It’s a warning that will be weighing on the mind of Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the man who will probably become Germany’s next chancellor. The federal election this Sunday is the culmination of a messy and fraught campaign. Olaf Scholz, the left-wing Social Democratic party (SPD) chancellor, called the vote shortly before Christmas, seven months early. His hand was forced after his three-way governing coalition finally collapsed after nearly three years of infighting. The campaign has been punctuated by three mass attacks in two months – two of them designated as terror incidents – that have left ten dead and more than 340 injured in the cities of Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and Munich. Since the alleged perpetrator of each attack was foreign-born (two are failed asylum seekers who successfully avoided deportation), the issue of migration has dominated.
But migration isn’t Germany’s only problem. There has been no economic growth since 2022; the number of unemployed Germans rose to 1.5 million last year; the cost of living is rising. Crime is at a 15-year high.
Germans are frustrated, anxious and increasingly poor. It is no surprise, then, as the country heads to the polls, that there is a deep distrust for establishment politicians. If Merz doesn’t get it right – if he fails to lift the country out of its malaise and put it back on the path to prosperity – his government could collapse. With the increasingly popular Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party creeping closer to the centre of German politics, could the country be facing a repeat of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 1930s, setting the stage for the far-right’s return to Berlin’s Chancellery?
As the country heads to the polls, there is a deep distrust for establishment politicians
If the polls are correct and the CDU is the largest party, with around 30 per cent of the vote, Merz’s first challenge will be to cobble together a coalition government. After Sunday, his best option will probably be to partner with one of the two parties vying for third place: Scholz’s SPD (to form a so-called ‘GroKo’, or grand coalition) or the Greens (the ‘Kiwi coalition’).
There are also three parties dancing around the 5 per cent threshold needed to make it to the Bundestag. If they pass the threshold, the Free Democratic party (FDP), populist left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) and hard-left Linke parties could each win just over 30 seats. For parties polling at such low numbers, they nevertheless could become the kingmakers for any coalition Merz tries to assemble.
If just one of these three parties manages to make it into the Bundestag, the proportional size of the other parties will shrink. This could force Merz to bring them into his coalition to make up the numbers needed for his majority. He could end up with a ‘blackberry coalition’ (the CDU, SPD and BSW colours are black, red and purple) or a ‘Kenya coalition’ (CDU, SPD and the Greens’ combined colours resemble the Kenyan flag).
As for the AfD, the party is expected to come second in their highest ever federal result, and some polls have predicted they will win every single state in former East Germany. But to enter a coalition with the AfD would be political suicide for Merz. Last week, he once again swore that he wouldn’t consider it. In a televised election debate, he turned to AfD co-leader Alice Weidel and said: ‘Not with you.’ Nevertheless, Merz’s establishment opponents argue that he has already crossed the Rubicon by legitimising the AfD’s influence and power in parliament, when at the start of the month – to the horror of the other establishment parties – Merz relied on AfD support to pass a non-binding vote on illegal migration.
The rise of the far-right AfD has been viewed with increasing alarm from Berlin. Since Christmas the party has received high-profile endorsements from Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. At the Munich Security Conference last week, Vance denounced Germany’s politicians for isolating the AfD. ‘Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,’ he said. ‘There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.’
Germany’s establishment parties, however, believe that engaging with the AfD in any meaningful way would threaten the country’s democracy and amount to a betrayal of the decades Germany has spent trying to atone for its Nazi history. Before the vote on illegal migration, Scholz said: ‘The firewall between democratic and undemocratic parties must not be allowed to falter.’
The AfD’s many critics often draw parallels between the party and the Nazis. These may be attack lines, but they are not all without justification. Some of the AfD’s highest-profile politicians have enjoyed flirting with Nazi imagery, phrases and ideology.
In the summer, for example, the AfD’s regional branch in Thuringia (one of three branches classified by the security services as a right-wing extremist group) brought out its state election manifesto with the lyrics of a song printed in the front. It began:
Do you still rustle, you old forests,
high up from the Rennsteig?
Do you still rock your high, celebratory sound
through golden fields?
Saale, oh you source of legends,
do you still reflect bright
mountains and castles and vineyards?
They were the words of the poet Franz Langheinrich, an early and fervent supporter of the Führer who wrote articles attacking ‘Semitic subhumans’. Since the second world war, the use and distribution of Nazi symbols has been illegal in Germany. The AfD’s Thuringia branch leader, Björn Höcke, has been fined several times by the courts for using the phrase ‘Alles für Deutschland’ – a recognised Nazi slogan used by the SA. For the federal election campaign, the AfD has been printing placards that read ‘Alice für Deutschland’ – a play on Weidel’s name.
Most of the AfD’s supporters are not neo-Nazis, of course. The disillusionment, anger and frustration with conventional politics mean that the party’s promises for deportations ‘on a massive scale’ is starting to appeal to ordinary voters who worry about Germany’s future more than its past.
Merz’s establishment party rivals also face a dilemma. Some SPD and Green politicians have been under pressure to refuse to enter coalition talks with Merz after his stunt vote in the Bundestag. But if they reject partnership with the CDU, will they end up forcing Merz towards further collaboration with the AfD just to keep his grip on power?
The problem for Merz is that he needs the Greens and SPD more than they need him. Both parties believe that Merz’s pledge to close Germany’s borders and crack down on illegal migration is unconstitutional in both German and EU law. What concessions will he have to make to get either of them to join a coalition?
The CDU has other fundamental differences of opinion with the SPD and Greens. Both of the latter want to reform Germany’s debt brake – the constitutional limit that dictates how much the government can borrow – to fund further aid for Ukraine and increase defence spending. Merz instead insists money for this can be found without taking on more debt.
Any changes to Germany’s constitutional law, whether on the debt brake or Merz’s migration proposals, must be approved by two-thirds of the Bundestag. If the polls are correct, the AfD isn’t far off being able to team up with a smaller party to form a so-called ‘blocking minority’ of 33 per cent. This way, they would be able to stop any proposed legislation they didn’t agree with and cause countless headaches for Merz.
Scholz’s failure to hold a government together is a stark warning to his successor. And yet the stakes for Merz are much higher. Many German politicians view this parliament as the last chance to keep the AfD from winning power in 2029. Another coalition collapse will only erode public trust in politics even further.
So is Germany heading towards a second Weimar? Merz’s coalition negotiations will last weeks, if not months – the Bundestag vote to confirm him as chancellor isn’t likely to happen before Easter. He will be taking over a country increasingly seduced by the message of far-right populism. The parallels with the Germany of nearly 100 years ago are compelling. Does tomorrow belong to the AfD?
An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal
Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti, as this new book calls her in a break with convention, is better known by her maiden name: Elizabeth Siddal or Siddall (the spelling is uncertain, as is much else about her). The Pre-Raphaelite icon was familiar to the public as the model for John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ sinking to her watery grave and as the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who eventually married her. Not long afterwards she died of an opiate overdose in 1862, aged 32.
Her early demise, echoing her association with Ophelia, left her ripe for myth-making, as first explored by Jan Marsh in her groundbreaking The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989). By the fin de siècle, the late Mrs Rossetti was a pin-up for the Decadent movement, a glamorised compound of beauty and death; in the 1920s, Violet Hunt’s biography plumbed a nadir of sensationalist fabrication; by the mid-20th century, Siddal had literally become a fictional character, featuring in novel after novel with fanciful titles ranging from Angel with Bright Hair (1957) to Pale as the Dead (2002).
It was only from the 1980s that serious attention gradually began to be paid to an aspect of Siddal that had previously been sidelined: the fact that she had been not just a model but an artist in her own right. Glenda Youde’s study, drawing on the work of Marsh and others, takes that scholarship further by offering detailed art-historical analysis to suggest that Siddal’s imaginative input was more central to the Pre-Raphaelite project than has previously been supposed.
Youde begins by sifting the facts from the fictions, noting how retellings of the ‘Lizzie Siddal’ narrative tend to reduce it to a few anecdotes, some based in reality, others not. That the young Siddal posed for Millais in a bathtub of water, and caught a chill as a result, is true. So is the story – macabre though it sounds – that Rossetti exhumed her corpse to retrieve the poetry manuscript he had buried with her (the scene was given the full gothic treatment by Ken Russell in his film Dante’s Inferno).
But the received view that Siddal was ‘discovered’ for her shimmering beauty while working in a bonnet shop turns out to be fanciful. In fact she was employed as a more upmarket private dressmaker and already had artistic aspirations when a client’s family turned out to include a Mr Deverell, who worked for the Government School of Design. She showed him ‘some outlines, designs of her own leisure hours’; he introduced her to his son, Walter, a young painter on the fringes of the emerging Pre-Raphaelite movement, for whom she posed as Viola in wrinkly tights in 1849.
Siddal seems to have first agreed to model as a way in to artistic circles. Early sittings – including as an Ancient Briton, courtesy of Holman Hunt – do not beautify her at all. But her persistence (including in the bathtub) paid off. Walter Deverell’s friend Rossetti eventually took her on as his pupil.
Her imaginative sketches often seem to look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era
Their relationship soon became more intimate, not just emotionally but in terms of artistic give-and-take. Many of Rossetti’s sketches from the life show her in the act of drawing or painting. Her imaginative talent was moreover recognised by other men in their circle. Ruskin thought she had ‘genius’, standing patron to her to the tune of £150 p.a. She was the only woman represented in the PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) show of 1857.
More than 100 drawings by Siddal are known today, some only from photos, but her oeuvre nevertheless remains something of a conundrum, often disparaged as ‘naive’ or ‘primitive’. In terms of shading, modelling and perspective, she is certainly far less technically secure than her male confrères or than other contemporary female painters loosely connected to the PRB circle. These included Barbara Bodichon and Joanna Boyce, both of whom, unlike Siddal, received academic art school training. However, as Youde explains, it is a mistake to focus on her draughtsmanship, because that is not what her contemporaries valued her for. Rather, her ‘genius’ was to be found in what Dante Gabriel’s brother, William Rossetti, called her ‘fecundity of invention’: her original compositional and iconographic ideas.
The influence that her sketched designs went on to have on the developing Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, as it moved away from minute naturalism to something more stylised, can be best seen in her medievalist watercolour ‘Lady Clare’ (1854-57). With turned-down gaze, sinuous neck and luxuriant hair, the central female figure offers the first, embryonic pre-echo of what would eventually become the cliché of the Pre-Raphaelite feminine ideal, as seen later in Rossetti’s pictures of Jane Morris and in the work of Edward Burne-Jones.
If Siddal was a Pre-Raphaelite muse, Youde contends, it was in a practical rather than romantic way: as a source for subjects, often taken from literary sources, and for design ideas, such as contorted figure poses drawn from the imagination rather than the life school. We see how, years after her death, Rossetti returned to her sketches for inspiration. After she died, he also had all her drawings meticulously photographed and circulated in several albums among fellow artists, as is now documented in full detail for the first time. As late as the 1890s, the painter Frederick James Fields, who owned one of the albums, copied the pose for his figure of ‘Sister Helen’ from Siddal’s 1854 sketch of the same subject. Youde’s commitment to chasing up every minute lead in terms of possible artistic influence makes this book feel a little pedestrian and heavy on detail. But the build up of evidence she cites compels.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Rossetti née Siddal as a person remains a recessive and mysterious character. Indeed, her own brother-in-law felt that her conversation gave ‘little clue to her real self or to anything determinate’. This perhaps reflects the anomalousness and anxiety of her social position at a time when contortedly minute nuances of gender and class governed Victorian society. Other Pre-Raphaelite models were working-class mistresses, picked up on the street for their looks. She, in contrast (as has only belatedly emerged through the continuing research efforts of Jan Marsh), was lower-middle class, the daughter of a prosperous, upwardly mobile ironmonger.
Her venture into modelling must have been daringly unconventional for a woman from a socially aspirational background. It’s only too relevant that the story of ‘Lady Clare’, taken from Tennyson, is a dramatic one of secret low birth with more than a symbolic hint of imposter syndrome. Youde’s decision to call her subject by her married name may seem to some retrogressive. But the artist herself – whose on-off relationship with Rossetti dragged on for years before they tied the knot – would have regarded it as a sign of status and acceptance.
It was perhaps Siddal’s sense of not quite belonging that gave her work its ‘startling peculiarities’, to quote one Victorian critic. Her self-portrait, made in 1853, probably in the experimental combination of watercolour with pigment and gum, gives little away. Almost aggressively unglamorised, its hooded eyes, with the blond lashes of a redhead, stare out at the viewer warily with a sort of defensive boldness.
It makes a strange contrast with Rossetti’s lush and idealised posthumous oil painting of her as ‘Beata Beatrix’, swooning ecstatically at the moment of death, an opium poppy in her hand. The grand operatic excesses of the latter, with its sinuous neck and luscious hair, contrast poignantly with an earlier, domestically intimate, in-the-moment pen-and-ink drawing he made of Elizabeth leaning forward in concentration to sketch his own portrait as he sat with his feet on a chair.
We’ll never know whether Mrs Rossetti took her final laudanum fix by accident or design. At a time when the drug was the commonest over-the-counter painkiller, many were unacknowledged addicts and it was easy to up the dose too far by mistake, especially for someone who was depressed, as she had every reason to be at the time, having recently suffered a stillbirth.
She never painted the sort of masterpieces in oils that make reputations. But her imaginative sketches – odd, edgy, even cack-handed – often seem to look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era. They turn out to have proved in their own way more significant to the Pre-Raphaelite legacy than her mythographers, in love with her passive victimhood, have usually tended to credit.
Letters: The brilliant uselessness of art
Wonderfully useless
Sir: Michael Simmons overlooks some scandalous examples of frivolous funding right under his nose (‘Waste land’, 15 February). A few minutes from our offices, there are several vast buildings, all lavishly subsidised by the taxpayer, whose sole purpose is to allow hordes of strangers to stare at rectangular sheets of fabric on which are daubed various colours and shapes – most of which quite wastefully replicate things that we can already see with our own eyes in the real world. Across the river, many millions more are spent on small armies of people coming together to bang, scrape and blow bits of wood, metal and brass for hours on end so that other people can sit and listen to them for no other reason than – brace yourselves, Spaffers – to enjoy themselves.
The arts are, by definition, frivolous. That is their gift: they carve out a space for us in which the demand for utility – which weighs down on so much of the rest of our lives – is suspended. Beethoven’s late string quartets, the paintings of Manet, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky – all quite useless! And yet it is this very quality, their total, majestic uselessness, that makes great art so unassailably useful. The Arts Council-funded projects that Simmons lists in his piece are indeed risible. But they’re risible not because they are frivolous, but because they are not frivolous enough. The reason why we’re in a place where plays ‘about Brexit’ and festivals ‘about sustainability’ are being funded by the Arts Council is precisely because of articles that demand that art becomes ‘less frivolous’, more ‘relevant’, more ‘useful’.
Art can of course exit this squalid little game of having to justify its ‘use’ to the public by refusing public subsidy. But if you believe in public subsidy for the arts at all, demanding the elimination of the frivolous from arts funding is tantamount to a declaration of war on art itself – and thus also on my pages.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Arts editor, The Spectator, London SW1
My British pride
Sir: Douglas Murray (‘Pride in Britain? It’s history’, 15 February) suggests that those who settle in our country with citizenship are unable to take the same pride in Britain as someone whose family has been here since time immemorial. I wholeheartedly disagree. My father came to this country – from Pakistan, no less – in 1972. He’s never been back. He speaks proudly of British history, British success in conflicts, and yearns for the return of the royal yacht Britannia. He’s had successful businesses and been a member of the Conservative party for decades. Now I am proud to represent the party. I suspect Douglas Murray misses the fact that it isn’t about where people come from, but about who we allow to settle here. Many from Pakistan and elsewhere won’t share British values. Do we want those people to settle? I don’t think so. Being British is a privilege, not a right. This is something Kemi Badenoch has spoken about and I hope she will address.
Cllr Nadim Muslim
Bolton, Lancashire
Airey promises
Sir: Is Kemi Badenoch right to make a hero of Airey Neave (Politics,15 February)? His wartime bravery and skill as an intelligence officer should always command unstinting admiration. Political dissimulation, at which Neave excelled (as he showed during the Thatcher leadership campaign), is a quality every successful leader needs, as long as it is deployed with care and thought. But he was never remotely interested in political ideas. He supported Margaret Thatcher to the hilt without ever engaging in economic or social arguments, and was handicapped by being acutely sensitive to media criticism, which irritated his colleagues.
After 1975, he largely confined himself to his shadow cabinet responsibilities for Northern Ireland, but in calling for tough new measures against the IRA he was rather overshadowed by Labour’s pugnacious Northern Ireland Secretary, Roy Mason, who implemented them. Neave formulated a plan to make Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom much stronger, but after his murder in 1979 Mrs Thatcher ditched the policy in favour of power-sharing between Unionist and Nationalist parties, which Ted Heath had introduced and which has carried the day ever since. It is hard to see how Airey Neave’s work can greatly assist Mrs Badenoch’s success.
Alistair Lexden
(Adviser to Airey Neave 1977-79)
House of Lords, London SW1
View from the pew
Sir: I find it regrettable that Charles Moore (Notes, 15 February) seems to propose the Bishop of Norwich as a possible candidate to replace Justin Welby. Some years ago, when I lived in Norfolk, I had a letter published in the Eastern Daily Press in which I objected to the Bishop’s plans to amalgamate numerous parishes. My parish priest told me that the bishop had asked him: ‘What is her standing?’ As I merely attended church my views were clearly of no importance to him. Our institutions ignore their bedrock supporters to their detriment.
Jane Moth
Stone, Staffordshire
Bring back Rafferty
Sir: I agree with my former boss Charles Moore’s piece about the demise of Radio 3 (Notes, 8 February). Another of the BBC’s ‘If it ain’t broke, fix it’ mistakes. There is, however, a major omission in his piece. The long-standing jewel in Radio 3’s crown was its unparalleled broadcaster Sean Rafferty, the voice of In Tune. Was it ageism that made the controller of Radio 3 lose Sean Rafferty and gain a presenter who appears to think the slot should be a jolly chat in which to flatter and giggle? Rafferty talked with understanding and knowledge of music and musicians. This was never more evident than in his last broadcast just before Christmas, when we listeners learnt it was to be his last. Now I switch off at 5 p.m.
Tamasin Day-Lewis
Somerset
Brace for an outbreak of Trumpist investor activism
If the new Trump era has a theme, it’s one of quixotic disruption with random consequences. In that spirit, stand by for more interventions from activist shareholders seeking to electrify sluggish businesses while making fast bucks on the way through.
The first episode over here was the attack by the New York investor Boaz Weinstein on seven London-listed investment trusts, in which he acquired stakes and forced shareholder votes to replace board members, with the aim of taking the trusts’ assets under the management of his own firm, Saba Capital.
‘Go home! You’re selfish and wasteful,’ shouted one headline after Weinstein was emphatically defeated in all seven polls. But his response was to launch a new action against two of the same trusts plus two others, while posting videos of athletes who fought back to win. In the meantime, he still holds stakes the trust boards can’t ignore – and having spurred their share prices, he’s sitting on ‘greenmail’ profits.
So he’s not going home soon. But is he merely a blundering Trumpist? His tactics ‘look like those of a general who has not properly recced the ground’, says Jonathan Davis, author of The Investment Trusts Handbook. ‘But his targets will lose the battle in the end unless they convince remaining shareholders they’re worth saving. That will only happen if they admit the merit of his complaints about complacency and poor performance.’
And Jonathan Simpson-Dent – chairman of Edinburgh Worldwide, the last of the seven trusts to vote Weinstein down – almost agrees: ‘To stay relevant and viable, boards and managers need to excite shareholders with properly differentiated strategies… Me-too mandates and mediocre performance will not be tolerated.’ On balance, I’d say Weinstein has given the sleepy old trust sector a useful kick in the butt.
Drill, BP, drill!
Next in line: BP, the limping energy giant in which Elliott Management – another activist investor from New York, but with a more convincing track record than Weinstein – has built a reported 5 per cent stake. Elliott is expected to urge an accelerated re-focusing on BP’s core oil and gas business and a retreat from the net-zero-chasing wind and solar projects that critics say have depressed its share price. There may also be pressure to oust BP’s Norwegian chairman Helge Lund who (along with former chief executive Bernard Looney) is associated with the pivot towards renewables.
Some pundits think shareholder disgruntlement may even push BP towards a merger with its rival Shell, creating a national champion of energy security in the old-fashioned style. The combination would also be a bastion against the possibility of an aggressive takeover by a US oil major such as Chevron or Exxon. An American bid would be urged on by the Trump White House with chants of ‘Drill, baby, drill!’. But BP could expect no support at all from our own Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, who would presumably prefer to see BP focus on faraway fields under foreign ownership, or just wither and die.
One way and another, Looney’s successor Murray Auchincloss – with Elliott lurking menacingly at his shoulder – has some tricky questions to address at BP’s ‘capital markets update’ next week.
Own-goal Rachel
I’m delighted to introduce my ‘Rachel Reeves own goal of the month’ competition. But before you rush to nominate her alleged misuse of company credit cards in an earlier career, consider her misfired attempt to quell the ongoing car finance scandal.
In October, the Court of Appeal ruled it illegal for car dealers to receive commissions from the lenders who finance 80 per cent of new UK car sales without revealing the commission to the customer. A tsunami of compensation claims looms for lenders such as Close Brothers, Lloyds and Santander if the decision is upheld by the Supreme Court in April. Last month, the Chancellor warned that a final judgment in the claimants’ favour could cripple the car loan market, trigger a slump in sales and hold back the economic growth she so ardently seeks.
Shares in Close and Lloyds jumped in response, while Santander scotched rumours that, having provided £295 million against car loan claims, it planned to quit the UK altogether. But on Monday the Supreme Court rejected a Treasury application to present Reeves’s plea at the forthcoming hearing. Down came lenders’ share prices again; back up towards £40 billion went estimates of the total compensation bill. All in a day’s work for our disaster-prone Chancellor.
Goddamn Zoom
Here’s another competition: could you name the bosses of any major UK bank, or pick them out in a police lineup? In a so-far relatively quiescent decade, car finance apart, the big characters – the Fred Goodwins, the Bob Diamonds – have all gone, making it much harder for your columnist to bring their milieu to life on the page. So thank goodness for the unrestrained voice from across the Atlantic of Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JP Morgan Chase since 2006, unscarred by the 2008 crisis, unbowed by heart surgery, famously crypto-sceptic, the world’s undisputed top banker and still not ready to name his own successor.
Most recently he’s been holding forth on the subject of stay-at-home Gen Z-ers. Here’s an abbreviated version: ‘A lot of you were on the fucking Zoom and you were looking at your mail, sending texts, not paying attention… You don’t do that in my goddamn meetings… If you don’t want to work [here], that’s fine with me. It’s a free country. But I’ve had it with this kind of stuff.’
Sensitive creatures our young colleagues may be, but that’s the way to tell ’em.
Aristotle and the leisurely pursuit of education
Nearly six million people are on out-of-work benefits. It is claimed that, for most of those, going back to work would not be financially worth it. Aristotle would have agreed with them because for him, leisure was the most important possession a man could have.
The ancients generally had no concept of the dignity of labour, apart from idealistic views about the farmer working in harmony with gods and man for the moral betterment of mankind. For most people, work was a painful necessity whose only purpose was to keep you from penury. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 680 bc) saw farming mainly as a matter of survival, when men ‘will never cease from toil and misery by day and night’, though he did agree that at least it was possible to make it a route to riches, ‘which is accompanied by honour and prestige’.
Further, Greeks did not distinguish, as we do, between a person and abilities he had to offer. If the only way you could survive was to work for, and therefore depend on, someone else, you made yourself almost the equivalent of a slave. As Aristotle put it, ‘the condition of the free man is that he does not live for the benefit of others’.
So what was it about leisure that made it so important? Since for Aristotle the intellect was the divine element within us, one must engage in intellectual pursuits if one was to fulfil oneself most completely and become truly happy. That required learning and education, for which one needed leisure (the Greek word is skholê, our ‘school’; cf. the Latin ludus meaning ‘school’ and ‘recreation’). Further, man was also a politikon zôon (‘communal animal’), who alone could perceive what was ‘good and bad, just and unjust, and so on’, distinctions critical for a securely functioning society. Aristotle, thrilled at the principle of the state providing leisure for millions, would immediately establish an adult education system designed to serve their needs. As for cleaning the lavatory and putting out the bins, AI can do all that (unless Lord Hermer judges it breaches its inhuman rights).
Is Britain funding organisations that wish us harm?
Michael Simmons has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Frivolous state funding isn’t only going to chancers, the plain lucky and the devious, but also to those who would see Britain – and the West – come to harm. Just over a year ago, the National Secular Society (NSS) compiled a dossier for the Charity Commission which called for 44 charities that had ‘fuelled anti-Semitism and division’ and shown support for ‘Hamas and other anti-western actors’ to be investigated. In every case these organisations have kept their charitable status.
The charities in the dossier have the stated purpose of ‘the advancement of religion for the public benefit’. In the NSS’s view, this is being used as cover for political agendas and extremist views – while the groups receive tax breaks and state funding.
The Spectator’s search engine to discover frivolous state funding, launched last week, shows that charities ‘advancing religion’ have received more than £1 billion in government grants in the past five years. These grants include £2.5 million to a charity promoting ‘Krishna consciousness’ and £20,000 to a dance company. While this funding may be frivolous, these organisations pose no harm to society. But can the same be said for all religious charities receiving public money or the perks that come with charitable status? As well as frivolous funding, are we also funding fanaticism?
The Charity Commission’s guidance states that the ‘public benefit requirement’ is a legal obligation which every charity must be able to demonstrate in all its activities. The Commission, in turn, is responsible for ensuring that charities ‘meet the public benefit requirement’ – and trustees have a legal duty to uphold it. The Commission is staffed by some 477 civil servants. Yet in many cases, it appears either unable or unwilling to enforce these rules.
Was Swansea Mosque and Islamic Community Centre contributing to the ‘public benefit’ when, ten days after the 7 October attacks in Israel, a preacher told worshippers ‘Victory to Islam’? The imam went on: ‘Get rid of your enemy and theirs and the enemies of the faith, destroy them and curse them and show us that they can be a lesson for anyone that goes against the faith.’
The charity Islam Answers has a video on YouTube saying: ‘Eradicate the enemies of the Muslims’
Over two years, the charity has received nearly £300,000 in grants and reclaimed £27,000 in Gift Aid – along with the other tax breaks that all charities enjoy.
On 20 October 2023, the Abdullah Quilliam Society streamed a sermon on Facebook which called the BBC’s reporting of the Hamas attack ‘complete lies’. It added: ‘If the two billion [Muslims] just marched on Israel, it’s all over. If we spat in the direction of Israel – two billion – it’s all over… You will be superior. You will be the superpower. No America, no Israeli, no British army can overpower you.’ The video remains on the charity’s Facebook page. That same year, it received a £7,000 government grant.
Should organisations which state they are at war with the West receive government funding? Acton’s Muslim Welfare Association only recently removed a Facebook video page containing the passage: ‘Not only are you facing Israel, we are facing the whole West. It is not only a war between the Palestinian and the Israeli people. But it is in fact a crusader war against Islam and against Muslims.’ The association has received £10,000 in government grants in the past four years.
Meanwhile, another charitable organisation, Islam Answers, has a video on its YouTube page saying: ‘Eradicate the enemies of the Muslims and the long suffering of the people of Gaza.’ Other mosques with charitable status publish openly anti-Semitic content online. Al-Istiqaamah, which describes itself as a ‘children’s Islamic evening school’, posted an article after the Hamas attacks that included the line: ‘In an ideological warfare, this is how the Jews try to dominate the world.’ The article also contained passages on ‘the treachery of the Jews (Zionists)’ and ‘Jewish propaganda’, followed by: ‘Jews are the people who taught the world the art of deception and hypocrisy.’ Yet Al-Istiqaamah remains a registered charity entitled to tax breaks, the ability to reclaim Gift Aid and easier access to grants and funding.
Then there is the Alfurqan Islamic Centre in Manchester, which hosted an imam who in the aftermath of 7 October was filmed praying for the victory of the ‘mujahideen’. The centre’s charitable arm has received £78,000 in taxpayer grants. Of course, it’s possible these individuals were acting without the charities’ knowledge or endorsement, but that doesn’t excuse it.
In December, the Times claimed that two charities – Dar Alhekha Trust and the Abrar Islamic Foundation – have possible links to the Iranian regime (they denied any allegations of wrongdoing). The Charity Commission opened an investigation but has had to pause it while the police decide whether or not to investigate, a process that could take years. In the meantime, both charities continue to reap the benefits conferred by charitable status. Dar Alhekma Trust said there is no formal police investigation and claimed the charity had been subject to foreign interference by the Bahraini government.
Last year, the Commission was accused of being ‘toothless’ by Fiyaz Mughal, who founded Faith Matters, an anti-extremism inter-faith group. The Telegraph reported then that the Commission could be given powers to clamp down on charities promoting Islamism following warnings from the Home Office, yet this has not happened.
While the NSS’s dossier was specifically focused on Islamic organisations, the issue of public benefit arises across many other religious charities.
The Spectator understands that the Charity Commission has internally investigated some – though not all – of the organisations mentioned in the NSS dossier and has issued an official warning to one charity. Some cases are ongoing. Red tape, and perhaps the all too familiar fears concerning public perception, continue to block any firm action being taken. ‘The Charity Commission now has nearly 500 employees yet this battalion of bureaucrats seem incapable of getting to grips with the Islamists using the cloak of charitable status to fund extremism,’ one expert who advises the government on counter-terrorism tells me. ‘This empire should be shaken up or even broken up.’ In fairness, the Commission can only act within the powers it has been handed by parliament. While it can issue guidance to charity trustees, or remove a trustee in extreme cases, only the High Court can remove an organisation’s charitable status. Which prompts the question of why the Commission needs to employ nearly 500 civil servants at a cost of more than £2 million in salaries every month?
If the Commission’s staff do not have adequate powers to take action against the type of organisations that the government’s own counter-terror advisers are concerned about, then what do they spend their days doing? As one government adviser tells me: ‘All that money, all that staff, and every time they just seem to thank people for alerting them, then go at a glacial pace.’
Of course, in a free society, organisations should have the right to promote, campaign for and express almost any belief – no matter how controversial – so long as they do not incite violence. But why should taxpayers be expected to subsidise those who push political agendas, promote extremism or blur the line between religious mission and radical activism? How many more cases are needed before the Charity Commission enforces its own rules or is given the appropriate powers to do so?
Colombia is a better place to watch football than Loftus Road
I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a job in Medellin. Can’t think where she gets that rebellious streak! So that’s why I’ve spent the past week in South America.
Colombia is quite a long way to go for such a short trip. To get to Medellin, I flew via Madrid, which meant departing from Gatwick at 10 a.m. and arriving at about 8 p.m. local time, a 13-hour journey. If you factor in getting to and from the airport either side, as well as faffing about with security, it took the best part of 24 hours.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed being shown around by my daughter and her Colombian boyfriend, a 26-year-old former professional footballer. They took me on a whistle-stop tour of Medellin’s most famous landmarks, including Comuna 13, a neighbourhood once controlled by Pablo Escobar and now a tourist attraction, complete with outdoor escalators to carry you up to the favela that used to house his private army.
It’s actually legal to possess small quantities of cocaine in Colombia and the President, Gustavo Petro, has just called for it to be legalised worldwide, claiming it’s ‘no worse than whisky’. But to complicate things, it’s against the law to buy it, which means the street dealers offer to sell you a can of Coca-Cola for 50,000 pesos (£10) and throw in a gram of the devil’s dandruff for free. My daughter and her boyfriend were very disapproving of this, insisting that the city has moved on since the Escobar era and has more to offer than drugs and organised crime.
After a hectic weekend in Medellin, we went by plane and then motor launch to Isla Fuerte, a tiny coral island in the Caribbean about 220 miles north of the city. The abundant wildlife was spectacular, with macaws, sloths and iguanas all making an appearance. We stayed in a charming, ramshackle resort that billed itself as an ‘eco-hotel’ and made a big song and dance about being reliant on solar, but had a diesel–fuelled generator tucked away in a nearby wood. Since I’m a climate contrarian, this made the resort more appealing, not less. Falling asleep in a hammock by the ocean, listening to the waves lapping at the shore, did much to compensate for spending 13 hours in economy on Air Europa.
The island’s ‘eco-hotel’ had a diesel-fuelled generator tucked away in a nearby wood
The high point of the trip was going to see Atletico Nacional, the local football team in Medellin. It was very different from watching QPR play Preston at Loftus Road on a rainy Tuesday night, and not just because it was warm and sunny. The entire home end was taken up by tens of thousands of hardcore supporters – las ultras – who were bouncing up and down to an unseen band. As with English fans, they adapted the lyrics of well-known songs so they became about their team, but the difference was these were traditional Colombian folk tunes rather than pop classics like ‘Seven Nation Army’. And the supporters were singing continuously, rather than just occasionally, which meant no perceptible change in atmosphere when their team scored – which they did three times. There was no sense of bottled-up tension followed by ecstatic release, as there is at English games. These fans were in a state of constant ecstasy.
Another difference was the crowd had many more women – who were just as enthusiastic as the men. I’d guess that roughly 15 per cent of the fans at Loftus Road are female, whereas here it was more like half. Many of the young women were dressed up and seemingly present at the invitation of their male companions, as though a trip to see Nacional was part of a standard courtship ritual. By contrast, the only time I’ve seen people on a date at a football match in England was when QPR played Stoke on Valentine’s Day and the women looked like they were there on sufferance.
There were no away supporters in the stadium, which made for a much friendlier atmosphere than at Loftus Road, although that isn’t always the case. In September, a massive brawl here involved multiple stabbings and more than 25 injuries. Happily, such hooliganism hasn’t resulted in an alcohol ban, and salesmen in yellow vests roamed the aisles with large trays of beer perched on their heads.
My daughter loves it in Colombia and after a brief visit I can see why. I’m off to see QPR play Portsmouth at Fratton Park on Saturday and something tells me the atmosphere won’t be nearly so appealing.
The Battle for Britain | 22 February 2025
How to get your husband to do the vacuuming
This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending the drying cycle when I got home. This facility is, of course, almost entirely pointless. I use it all the time.
Thus I was nearly resigned to cancelling this column in order to spend the next six hours fixing the problem. Fortunately, resetting the router fixed the glitch straight away, which is why you are reading this now.
I am obsessed with this nonsense. I recently spent half an hour ‘upgrading the firmware’ on my lavatory. Yet this world of connected devices (aka ‘the internet of things’) exposes us to many vulnerabilities. It’s not just the firmware or software, however: the component most vulnerable to exploitation is the Y chromosome. Men need to be on their guard against an irrational yet persistent belief that our manhood is enhanced by displays of technological prowess. Why?
The Acheulean Period of human development lasted from 1.5 million to 110,000 years ago, encompassing both homo erectus and early homo sapiens. The most distinctive archaeological feature of this era is the profusion of hand-axes, the stone heads of which have a symmetry and elegance which far surpass any practical function. This finding has given rise to the ‘sexy hand-axe’ theory in evolutionary psychology (Kohn and Mithen, 1999), proposing that elegant hand-axes, worn on the male waist, had become a status-signalling device in sexual selection. In the Palaeolithic era, being able to say ‘My father was a toolmaker’ wasn’t a political statement – it was a pick-up line.
Given how long the Acheulean period lasted, it should not surprise us if some vestiges of this belief were ingrained in our psychology (apparently male strippers frequently wear toolbelts). If so, it may have significant implications for the division of labour in modern households since, whether they like it or not, men may be hardwired to use displays of technical aptitude as a status signal.
Men may be hardwired to use displays of technical aptitude as a status signal
It is common to read analyses of gender imbalance in the home which claim women work twice as hard at domestic chores than men. In truth these studies are a little skewed, as they tend to omit from the definition of housework those tasks performed mostly by men: driving home from Cornwall at 1 a.m., putting up shelves or – that most male-dominated of all activities – killing a wasp. There was even a 1980s feminist joke: ‘Why did God invent men? Because a vibrator can’t mow the lawn.’
But all of this is set to change. And the reason is simple. Because of the sexy hand-axe instinct, it is possible for women to get men to perform any domestic task provided it involves complex technology or fancy equipment. Here’s a simple tip. If you want your husband to do all the cooking, do not under any circumstances buy him a recipe book: instead, get him into Japanese knives. After his 48 hours spent on YouTube exploring Damascus Steel and the Wootz forging process, you’ll have your own pet Jamie Oliver. Likewise if you want him to do the hoovering, do not explain how it’s done. Buy a robot vacuum cleaner instead.
We are, I predict, a decade away from an unplanned gender revolution where women go out to run the fixed-income trading desk at Goldman Sachs, while men stay home trying to get Alexa to talk to the fridge. It won’t be perfect. Women won’t return home to a newly laid dinner table or the welcoming smell of a freshly baked cake. But the hallway lights will come on automatically as soon as they open the door.