My solution to unfair traffic fines

My driveway now lies in the middle of an ‘Average Speed Check Zone’. It’s a wonderful arrangement – for me – since the slower traffic makes it easier to pull into the road. Yet I am still free to drive through the village like Fangio since average speed check cameras do not record your speed, only time taken between two points. Since I rarely drive past my house without stopping, it barely affects me at all.

It’s symptomatic of a wider problem. To what extent can we truly rely on technology to replace human judgment in the administration and enforcement of rules?

The legalisation of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) in private car parks has created a predatory breed of car-park operator, who rely more on fining unwitting offenders than on charging for legitimate parking. You and I would assume that if you pull into a pub car park, sit in the car for ten minutes and then drive off without leaving the vehicle, you have not in any meaningful sense ‘parked’. Yet by failing to notice the deliberately wordy signs informing you that your registration has been clocked, you will soon be liable for a fine of £80, reduced to £40 if you agree to pay quickly – when the original charge you’d failed to pay is often as low as £2 or so.

Even that £40 concession is malicious in a way. It is a minor equivalent of an Alford plea in the United States, where to avoid the risk of the death penalty a defendant pleads guilty despite maintaining his or her innocence.

So £40 is what I paid Heathrow Airport for dropping someone off at Terminal 5. I noticed there was a £5 charge but expected a barrier or a kiosk. There wasn’t one. I duly forgot all about it for 48 hours, by which time it was too late. I have worked in advertising for 30 years. Believe me, while it is quite difficult to display information in a form where everyone pays attention to it, conversely it is very easy indeed to convey information in a form which attracts no attention at all. A long screed about parking charges listing a web address and displayed at a point where the driver is busy trying to navigate Heathrow’s Kafkaesque road network definitely falls into the latter category.

This means ANPR – and often speed cameras and bus-lane cameras, too – pose a dilemma in asymmetric calibration known as a ‘Wittgenstein’s ruler’. When you measure a table using a ruler and get an unexpected result, then (unless you are Vladimir Putin) it is possibly the ruler that is odd, not the table. Hence if a traffic camera catches one person a day, that driver is likely at fault. If it catches 100 people a day, your camera or your signage – or the speed limit or bus lane itself – may need rethinking. Likewise if 1 per cent of people fail to pay to drop off a passenger at Heathrow, it may be their fault; if 5 per cent of people fail to pay, it’s probably Heathrow’s fault. Yet, as things stand, the worst cameras are deemed the most effective – and are most profitable.

If by law 95 per cent of fines went to charity, but late payment (the legitimate charge plus £5, say) went to the operator, this practice would end. It could also be ended if the government allowed you to link a mobile number to your car and mandated a text reminder be sent before issuing a fine.

Or there is a neater, Sicilian solution. Since the DVLA is happy to reveal my address to parking operators to allow them to fine me, it is only fair that they should reveal the home address of the CEO of the parking company to anyone who is fined. For good measure, they could helpfully add the names of any children, which schools they attend and what the family dog looks like. It won’t be long before the signage miraculously gets better.

Fraud victim? Don’t bank on getting your money back

Lloyds Bank has been running a new advertising campaign which updates its long-standing black horse corporate branding. The horses no longer thunder along a beach, but interact with people who we assume are actual or potential customers. The soothing payoff slogan goes: ‘Lloyds Bank. By your side.’

The latest episode features a girl who slightly puts me in mind of our 17-year-old daughter. She happens to bank with Lloyds, but there the happy parallel ends. On a Saturday afternoon in March, a person unknown withdrew £440 from our daughter’s account via an ATM. At that precise time, our daughter was playing her clarinet during an audition for a London orchestra.

I see from her bank statements that all her transactions are by debit card, usually for cups of tea or sandwiches, and rarely exceed £5. In the two years since she opened the account, she has not once used her debit card to withdraw cash from an ATM, let alone for such an enormous sum. As everyone knows – apart from Lloyds, apparently – no one under 40 touches cash any more. Yet when person unknown keyed in the demand for £440 of her money, no red flag was raised, no algorithm triggered in the Lloyds computer system.

Her balance was high because of the long hours she worked as a waitress last summer, mixing kale smoothies in our reassuringly overpriced local café. She was understandably devastated when she noticed the rogue withdrawal on her statement, but I reassured her Lloyds would swiftly put it right. Well, I was wrong about that.

It took us some 90 minutes to get through on the Lloyds fraud ‘hotline’, but worse was to follow. There was little sympathy or support from the woman in the call centre. She implied that if Florence had not made the withdrawal herself then she might have given the card and PIN to someone else who did. The money would not be refunded, she said, because there was no evidence that anyone had fraudulently obtained the information to make the transaction. I took over the phone and asked the woman bluntly if she thought my daughter had made the withdrawal herself, to which she replied: ‘Yes.’ I asked to speak to a supervisor but was told Brendan was working from home that night, and unavailable.

In a subsequent telephone call, Lloyds said they would not seek to review the CCTV at the Nationwide branch where the money was stolen, because to do so would breach my daughter’s rights under data protection laws. All they could advise was that we report the case to Action Fraud. This took nearly an hour but won’t help our daughter get her money back, because Action Fraud simply tracks levels of crime and has no investigatory powers.

Banks seem disinclined to address fraud – they would rather defame their customers than repair their useless legacy computer systems. The briefest internet search shows that fraud by cloning bank cards is absurdly easy and common, especially in the era of cashless payment.

Weary of endless waits on the phone, I wrote to the chief executive stressing my concerns not just about the £440, but that my daughter’s credit rating would be wrecked, causing her endless trouble in the years ahead. The woman in the call centre, having suggested our daughter might be a criminal, must presumably have recorded her suspicions on Lloyds’ systems and alerted the credit agencies.

The boss of Lloyds is Charles Nunn, though he prefers to be known as Charlie, according to a corporate video released online celebrating his appointment last year. He mentions that he loves cycling and that after a long career as a management consultant he ‘became very passionate about financial services’ and customer service. Despite these twin passions, he has not acknowledged the letter or addressed my concern over my daughter’s financial future.

Discussing this case with friends, I have found that almost everyone has their own horror story of a family member who has experienced bank fraud. The onus is placed on the victim to explain an event which they did not witness and cannot understand. Then there is a long, dreary road to an appeal to the financial ombudsman once the bank has washed its hands of the case.

Lloyds and NatWest only exist because of the billions taxpayers spent to save them from their own incompetence during the financial crisis. Yet still they close down branches and lay off staff, and act against any objective measure of the public interest. The question is: why do we put up with this outrageous corporate misconduct? Last year Lloyds had to pay a £90 million fine for sending millions of misleading insurance renewal letters to its customers. Five months ago, a senior Lloyds executive was recorded telling staff its computer systems were so outdated as to be no longer ‘fit for purpose’.

Yet Lloyds will not investigate who stole my daughter’s summer earnings. The lesson I have taken from my daughter’s ordeal is that, however much it professes to love horses, Lloyds Bank seems to have contempt for its own customers.

The horror of gluten-free beer

I was reminded of the worst liquid that I have ever consumed. It was the last occasion on which I drank Coca-Cola, nearly 50 years ago. To be fair to Coke, this bottle was at room temperature, and the room was in the Anatolian peninsula, during the ferocity of high summer. A group of us were travelling in a battered old bus, still four hours by bad roads from Izmir, hot water and cold beer.

Having run out of bottled water, we needed something to stave off dehydration. The village offered a choice: well water or parboiled Coke. An aristocratic French leftie was moved to a declamation: ‘Moi, j’ai un horreur de Coca-Cola.’ I concurred. But as every mouthful of well water would have contained at least 20 organisms lethal to a delicately nurtured western European stomach, there was no choice. I suggested to the grenouille that when he got back to Paris, he should seek to make an addendum to the Declaration of the Rights of Man: that no Frenchman should ever have to drink Coca-Cola. Anyway, we survived, with no cases of dysentery.

Although it would be an overstatement to call that memory a madeleine de Proust, it was sparked off by an encounter with possibly the second worst beverage that I have ever come across. Earlier this week, I was at a conference. Among other excellent speakers, we listened to John Bew and Niall Ferguson, who are shaping up to be their generation’s equivalent of George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.

Lesser figures were in charge of the catering. At the lunch break, I felt like a beer. Peroni was available, perfect for a warm day. But it tasted disgusting. What the devil was the matter? Can bottles of beer go off like corked wine? I scrutinised the label and there was the answer. The beer was gluten free. Goats and monkeys.

The Italian attitude to food and drink is an endless harmony between joy and good sense. In the kitchen, the Italians may never reach the Himalayan peaks of French haute cuisine. But they know how to make delicious ingredients sing. You have to try hard to find a bad meal in Italy, which is no longer the case in France. When haute cuisine fails, there are no safety nets. The result is pretentiousness: expensive pretentiousness at that.

Italian wine is constantly improving, and there is nothing wrong with normal Peroni. But ‘gluten free’? Pah. I cannot believe that any Italian has ever polluted his palate with the stuff. Presumably it was designed for the British market. One would like to think that the Italians have underestimated the British palate. Then again, there was a time when many Brits thought that Italian food was spaghettibol washed down by ‘Chianti’ from bottles covered in wicker-work, abetted by a waiter poncing around with an eight-foot pepper-grinder while massacring ‘O sole mio’.

There is a better recent memory. It was a long time since I had tasted Clos de la Roche, a magnificent Burgundy, up there with Chambertin Clos de Beze and the glories of the DRC. I had heard tell of Domaine Ponsot, a major Clos de la Roche producer. Indeed, there are those who insist that he is a worthy rival to Armand Rousseau. His wines are highly prized and, alas, appropriately priced. A friend with a serious interest in Burgundy produced a bottle of the Ponsot 2016, which had been in the decanter for four hours. Everything that a magnificent Burgundy ought to be, it would be a worthy Proustian aide-mémoire.

Dear Mary: How do we stop friends dropping by without calling?

Q. Some years ago, much to the surprise of our many friends in London, my husband and I moved to a remote village in Wales. We have never regretted it and often enthused to others about the area. Now we have been taken by surprise since two friends have bought a house in our village, citing our happiness as the reason for their move. While we like this couple, we don’t know them terribly well and are worried they will expect to see an awful lot of us. Our biggest dread is that, since there is bad signal here, they will assume it is OK for them to drop in without ringing first. How, without seeming unfriendly, can we respectfully draw boundaries when they have moved in?

– R.M., Wales

A. Tell these people how thrilled you are about their imminent move. During the conversation imply that your husband ‘tends to get overexcited’ about new neighbours and burst into their houses without calling ahead. Explain laughingly that you will have to draw up a ‘privacy plan’ to make sure that your husband knows the rule is set in stone – despite being friends, neither of you will drop in on the other without ringing first.

Q. A colleague has allowed me to rent his country cottage for four weeks at a generous mate’s rate. The cottage itself is somewhat claustrophobic so I mainly wanted to come because of the glorious views of rolling downland from the garden. My problem is a shrub which has grown so high that the main view is obscured. I asked my colleague whether he would like me to prune the shrub for him but he replied that it is a Hebe ‘Midsummer Beauty’ and it would be wrong to prune before it had flowered. Although I am paying a low rent, by the time it has flowered my tenancy will be over. Any ideas, Mary?

– B.M., East Sussex

A. Get a pea net from your local garden centre, throw this over the shrub and peg it down like a tent while you are lounging. This will suppress the height of the foliage in a gentle way and the buds will survive to flower in a few weeks.

Q. My teenage daughter, like most of her generation, never calls me, only texts. In the days of voice calls, I would have been able to tell from the background noise whether she is really revising at a friend’s house or is in fact at a pub or nightclub. She lets me track her phone’s location, which does show her at the friend’s house, but I am suspicious that she may have a second phone. Mary, what should I do?

– Name and address withheld

A. Why not announce that every so often you will call her at random using FaceTime? In this way she will have to make sure her ‘background’ at all times is the one you expect to see.

What the new GCSE in global warming should teach

For years, environmentalists have campaigned for children to study global warming as a subject rather than simply as a part of geography. Their wish has now been granted in England with a new GCSE in natural history, starting from 2025. We know nothing yet about the syllabus but it’s quite the opportunity to ask what our planet’s problems really are, and how effective the net-zero agenda is as a solution.

Rather than be scared to death about the future of the planet, pupils should instead be encouraged to take a rationalist approach. They might ask whether the obsession with climate change in recent decades has taken attention away from the many other major problems facing the planet. And they might also look at ‘extreme weather events’ and whether they really are claiming more lives.

Let’s start with hurricanes. The world experienced fewer of them in 2021 than in any year since satellites started to consistently record their prevalence. The latest study from the UN climate panel of scientists finds that hurricanes will be less frequent but stronger, thereby increasing the commercial cost of hurricane damage. But because the world will also get richer, relative damages will keep declining, just slightly more slowly than they would have done. A problem, yes. But not a catastrophe.

So is ‘climate chaos’ costing more lives – in the third world, or elsewhere? Insofar as official records can attest, the overall risk of climate-related disaster death has dropped over the last century, not by a little but by an astonishing 99 per cent. Over the past 20 years, as temperatures have gone up, heat deaths have increased by 116,000 per year. But a recent global Lancet study also shows that cold deaths, which are almost ten times more common, have declined by 283,000. It’s all about perspective.

For the best sense of what to expect from a warming planet, we should turn to the latest damage estimates from the economic models used by the Biden and the Obama administrations to set policy. This research reveals that the entire global cost of climate change – not just to economies, but in every sense – will be equivalent to less than a 4 per cent hit to GDP by the end of the century.

What do such percentages actually mean? By the UN’s own estimates, the average person in 2100 will be 450 per cent richer than today. Global warming will make this increase 4 per cent smaller, reducing it by 16 percentage points. It means that the average person in 2100 will ‘only’ be 434 per cent as rich. This is not a disaster.

There are practical implications. There certainly are studies showing that low-lying Bangladesh will be threatened by sea level rises by the end of the century. But similarly, the UN also assumes that by then Bangladesh will be richer than the Netherlands is now, and able to afford flood defences.

It’s crucial to apply economics to natural sciences because there certainly is a trade-off. The world already spends more than half a trillion dollars a year on climate policies, while rich-world government spending on innovation in areas such as healthcare, defence, agriculture and science has declined as a percentage of GDP over recent decades. Such investment underpins future growth, which perhaps explains why rich-world income has almost stalled this century. Compare this with China, where innovation spending is up 50 per cent, education is rapidly improving, and average incomes have increased five-fold since 2000.

A natural history course could ask children something else: why, despite all this focus, are we failing to solve climate change? Last year saw the highest global energy-related CO2 emissions ever. Britain is doing its bit, having lowered climate emissions relatively more than any G20 country since 2010, with overall per capita climate emissions lower than in Victorian times. But energy prices have increased substantially.

Most emissions in this century will come from developing countries keen to lift their people out of poverty with cheap and reliable energy. To get the rest of the world to join a decarbonisation agenda, we need to dramatically increase research and development funding in green energy sources, so these will eventually become so cheap that everyone can afford them.

The UK government recently announced ‘carbon literacy training’ for every local authority nursery, school, college and university in England. This ought to extend to where we are now – and the extent to which proclaimed solutions address the overall problem. If there is a mismatch, perhaps the next generation will be able to point this out and change a conversation that has stayed the same for far too long.

How hard is it to see an NHS dentist?

Biergate

Sir Keir Starmer was facing the scandal of ‘beergate’. Biergate is a lane in the Lincolnshire village of Grainthorpe. It is a noted area for grain production, although the origin of the name is not clear as it has also been recorded as Beargate on old maps. – It would not be happy hunting ground for Starmer or Labour as it has both a Conservative district and county councillor. – One thing you won’t find close by is beer. The village used to have a pub, the Black Horse Inn, but it closed in 2017.

Not sharing

Bill Gates declined to deny that he is shorting Tesla shares. What are the largest car companies by market capitalisation?

Tesla $897bn

Toyota $241bn

Volkswagen $106bn

BYD (China) $93bn

Mercedes-Benz $69bn

GM $58bn

Ford $57bn

BMW $54bn

Honda $46bn

Stellantis (Fiat/Chrysler/Peugeot/Citroen and others) $44bn

Flights of fancy

Prince Harry used a Maori TV programme to launch a new venture claiming to tell airline passengers how they can improve the ‘sustainability’ of their flights. How large are airline passengers’ carbon emissions?

– A return flight from London to Barcelona emits 0.5t CO2 equivalent per passenger. That exceeds the annual per capita emissions of 36 nations, accounting for 10% of the world’s population.

– Return flight from London to LA: 3.3t of CO2 equivalent; more than the annual per capita emissions of 130 countries, representing 53.7% of the global population.

– London to Auckland: 7.9t CO2 equivalent; more than per capita emissions of 135 countries, 84% of the world’s population.

Open wide?

It was reported that in Somerset not one NHS dentist is taking on new patients. How easy is it to get an NHS dental appointment?

– In 2020/21, 15.8m adults and 5.1m children saw an NHS dentist.

– In a survey of 850,000 NHS patients, 56% said they had tried to get an appointment with a dentist in the past two years. Only 74% were successful. Of those who had not tried, 34% said they used a private dentist, 23% said they had not needed a dentist, and 13% said they hadn’t tried because they thought they wouldn’t get an appointment.

Source: NHS England

The march of the ‘menosplainers’

I think we’ve reached peak menopause. You simply can’t switch on the radio, open a newspaper or watch telly without some fiftysomething media babe banging on about her hot flushes, sudden rages and the feeling of going mad. Davina McCall has just made a whole TV show about it (Sex, Mind and the Menopause), and her book Menopausing is out this month. McCall has likened her symptoms to those felt by people with a brain tumour. Clearly, she has never known anyone with a brain tumour, because those symptoms are a little more significant than simply forgetting where you left your keys, or feeling suddenly hot.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place in women’s magazines or in the health section of newspapers for features about ‘My menopause hell’. Every female journalist is entitled to her fair share of pieces about her biology – about pregnancy, periods, childbirth, child-rearing and the menopause: morning sickness so bad I puked on the Northern Line; I poured a bottle of Evian over my head during a hot flush at a Springsteen concert; I ate an entire box of chocolates because I was hormonal and I wanted them; and I’m a woman in charge of my own destiny.

The trouble is the sheer amount of it all – and the seriousness with which it’s taken. In my late mum’s time, two women going through menopause would exchange conspiratorial giggles as they whipped off as many clothes as they decently could, or fanned themselves, or said in unison ‘Is it me, or is it hot in here?’, which incidentally is the title of Jenni Murray’s book on the subject.

These days bookshop windows are full of the menopause. There’s a book by that medical expert – oh wait, no, Primrose Hill trendsetter – Meg Mathews, called The New Hot: Taking on the Menopause with Attitude and Style. There’s Menopocalypse: How I Learned to Thrive During the Menopause and How You Can Too by Amanda Thebe; Still Hot! 42 Brilliantly Honest Menopause Stories by Kaye Adams and Vicky Allan; Cracking the Menopause: While Keeping Yourself Together by Mariella Frostrup and Alice Smellie…

I have huge respect for Frostrup and if she told me to take smack to help with the menopause, I might just do it. However, I have to draw the line at an online event taking place next month called FlushFest. The ‘world’s only menopause festival’ is a two-day event with comedy acts, Kirsty Wark for gravitas, and, er, something called Fantoosh vulva painting. Crikey! I have no smart answers, except: can you imagine any man starting a Testicle Festival?

Sensing a lucrative theme and a vast, anxious and introspective audience, the publishing world is moving on to the perimenopause. This is the decade or so before the menopause when you can blame every ordinary incidence of stupidity or forgetfulness or weight gain on this demonic, pathological condition. Help is at hand in the form of Preparing for the Perimenopause and Menopause by Dr Louise Newson and The Perimenopause Solution by Dr Shahzadi Harper and Emma Bardwell.

The irony of these books is that for the most part the ‘solution’ they advise is hormone replacement therapy, which is these days in extremely short supply. Sajid Javid has even set up an HRT taskforce modelled on the Covid taskforce and said he’ll ‘leave no stone unturned in our national mission to boost supply of HRT’.

It’s not that menopause isn’t real or worth discussing. It can absolutely make you a moody cow, a bit fuzzy or foggy round the old noggin, or, in extreme cases, psychotic. It sucks – but then, much of life sucks. If we treat every female biological event with this level of serious, anxious attention, we’ll never talk about anything other than our own bodies. And if we present every normal biological event as a pathology, we are giving the guys exactly the ammo they need. Poor, disabled, hysterical women, no wonder they can’t think straight! This can’t be good. Corporate bosses are already reluctant to hire women they think might scoot off to give birth; now they’ll be terrified of hiring fortysomethings who might have brain fog.

Should we discuss menopause openly? Yes. Should we make out that it’s a tragedy? No. If it really is unbearable, there are 97 specialist NHS menopause clinics in the UK – not spread out fairly and not enough of them, the menosplainers say, but they are there. Or if you’ve got more dosh than black cohosh (a herbal remedy said to relieve the symptoms of menopause), go down the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop route and get a menopause coach. (What the heck do they say: one, two three, open your fan and pass the water?)

A few years ago, MP Jess Phillips tweeted about menopause: ‘Past looking pretty and giving birth, we are a burden.’ I don’t think that’s the right attitude at all. We all get old and less cute and more slack and a bit fat – both men and women. Not being fancied by passers-by isn’t the end of the world. Reproduction isn’t our only purpose.

The fire and fury of America’s abortion debate

I wonder at times how some of my fellow hacks in America get out of bed in the morning. The leak of a draft of a Supreme Court decision on abortion rights last week prompted what can only be called a collective nervous breakdown. ‘My teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour,’ New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister vented. ‘Bodies/minds are so weird. Like, not euphemistically – actually chattering. Audibly. And full shaking body. Though otherwise wholly, rationally, well and truly expecting it.’ Well, I wouldn’t say wholly rational, Rebecca, but you do you.

The terrifying ruling would send the abortion issue back from a single court to democratic debate and discussion – where it is in every other western country. The case before the court was a law that would put limits on abortion after 15 weeks – three weeks more liberal than the law in, say, Germany and most western countries. Polling shows big American popular majorities for legal abortion with some restrictions, so you’d think the Democrats would be psyched to have an issue in November where the Republicans are on the defensive.

But nah. Hysteria ruled. ‘Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said “Let’s burn this place down,”’ wrote a senior correspondent at Vox. The New York Times editorialised that various states would even now reimpose bans on interracial marriage – which has 94 per cent support. President Biden, who used to be a more conventional Catholic on the abortion question, harrumphed: ‘I’m not prepared to leave [abortion policy] to the whims of the public at the moment in local areas.’ Whims of the public! You may remember those as, well, democracy. Yes, a few states are likely to reimpose bans on abortion, if the draft ruling stands. So why not go to the voters and encourage them to rise up against this new draconianism? It sure is a better bet than running on your inflation record.

But Democrats, if they were honest with themselves, simply believe Americans are too ‘deplorable’ to govern themselves. They believe in their hearts that the rubes and the rednecks need correction by benevolent elites in the bureaucracy or the courts. So the Dems and their interest groups stick to manoeuvring to get benign court decisions and then have meltdowns on Twitter if they get reversed.

The wonderfully named Midge Decter died this week at the age of 94. Decter was one of the original neoconservatives and exemplified one core aspect of that movement: its spectacular nepotism. Decter married Norman Podhoretz, who edited Commentary, and was the mother of John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, a tiny magazine that nonetheless pays him $400,000 a year. Ferociously anti-communist, increasingly alienated from the left, Decter was a pioneering woman intellectual, helping frame the right-wing movement that gave us Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. But I remember her best for an amazing Commentary essay she wrote in 1980 about the homosexuals she ‘spent a good deal of [her] free waking time watching’ on Fire Island, a resort off the Hamptons. Like David Attenborough among a herd of meerkats, Midge talked of the gays with near clinical exactitude. They had ‘hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs, were smooth and silky’. They ‘dressed themselves in the garb of storm troopers and equip themselves with all manner of coated mail’. She even took a moment – in a legendary footnote – to describe the lesbians on the beach: ‘They were, or seemed to be, far fewer in number. Nor, except for a marked tendency to hang out in the company of large and usually ferocious dogs, were they instantly recognisable as the men were.’

All of this proved too much for Gore Vidal, who replied in the Nation a few months later, with this gem: ‘Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I’d get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto.’ There were plenty of other zingers too. Decter, Vidal wrote, ‘writes with the authority and easy confidence of someone who knows that she is very well known indeed to those few who know her’. And he finished his dissection of her frank loathing with a well-aimed dart at the Jewish intellectual: ‘For sheer vim and vigor, “The Boys on the Beach” outdoes its implicit model, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’

I’d much rather live now than then. But I preferred the pointed prose of 1981 to the banal blandishments of the pathologically inoffensive woke era. Every now and again, it made you laugh.

Putin’s emperor complex

Did Vladimir Putin ever use his infamous ‘historical’ account of Russia-Ukraine relations to consider how Ukrainians might react to his decision to attack them? Clearly not. The Roman historian Tacitus (d. c. ad 120) knew better what history was for.

Tacitus acknowledged that Rome under the tyranny of the emperors had become corrupted. As a result, it had lost that moral compass evident in its early history. Discussing the tribes of Germany, for example, he commented on the laudable strictness of their marriage laws (one man, one wife) and a life free of vice: ‘No one thinks vice funny, no one calls corrupting or being corrupted “modern life”.’ The implied contrast with imperial Rome was obvious.

Another German leader raised the same moral issue: Tacitus described how he urged a tribe to resume its ‘traditional way of life and throw off those luxuries that enslave Rome’s subjects far more effectively than Roman arms. Then, pure and uncorrupted, your slavery over, you will be the equals, or leaders, of men’.

Again, Tacitus described how the Britons willingly adopted Roman ways, building houses, marketplaces and temples, educating themselves, especially in Latin, wearing the toga, and enjoying the vices of promenading, bathing and fine dining. But he concluded ‘inexperienced as they were, what they called “real civilisation” was actually a mark of their subjugation’: they had been lured into slavery. The Caledonian leader Calgacus likewise made much of that threat when he was rallying his troops to face the Roman army.

Tacitus could understand why Rome’s subjects might have felt they had lost something important under imperial rule. But it was probably too much to expect that Putin, whose idea of statesmanship seems to consist of ‘murders, rapes and massacres, acts of black night, abominable deeds…’, should ever have stopped to reflect on history and wonder if a free Ukraine might not find being governed by Russia an attractive option, and to have considered other ways of winning them over, less disastrous and far cheaper than war. Luxury living, say?

Are iPhones sending women gaga?

The girl wound down her window, stuck her mobile phone out into midair, and started to take pictures of the sun.

I was behind her Mini on the southbound slip road off the A3 to the Cobham roundabout. On the left was the backed-up turn for Hersham down the Seven Hills Road which is always busy in the morning. I was queueing in the less busy right hand lane to go around the roundabout to Cobham to do the horses.

It should not have taken me long, even at 8 a.m. But the woman in the cream Mini in front of me was busy with her phone pointed up into the sky at a sun so blazing it was impossible to look anywhere near it.

What she captured I have no idea. It’s hard to think of anything more pointless than trying to photograph a blinding heat haze. But this girl was determined to accomplish it, while crawling up the slip road as the traffic edged forwards, veering from side to side as she steered with her left hand and took photos with her right.

As we neared the top, we missed the light change because she had started to use both hands to type something using both thumbs while steering with the sides of her arms.

On the next green light she veered across the road, thankfully heading for Hersham, so I came around her on the right and as I did so, beeped my horn. ‘Get off your phone!’ I shouted.

The girl looked at me with an expression that said she had no idea what she had done wrong.

She was still busy Instagramming or Facebooking – ‘sunny day! woo-hoo!’ – while steering with her elbows, and this being a very natural thing for her to do, she could not see why anyone should be cross with her.

As I drove away, it occurred to me that I notice so many young women texting as they drive I am starting to wonder: what the hell is wrong with women?

I’m not saying men don’t do it, but I’ve never seen it. I always see young girls and sometimes middle-aged ladies busy on their phones in the driving seat.

And so it came into my head, with apologies to women who might be offended by this, as I’m sure plenty will be, that the female sex has begun doing some very strange things due to their dependency on mobile technology.

I’ve noticed that a process of evolution seems to be under way whereby a generation of women are going completely gaga because of their phones.

The other day, the builder boyfriend came home from a job and said he couldn’t work out how this particular family were alive because the mother of the household did nothing but sit by her swimming pool on the phone all day long.

In order to feed them, she pressed an app on her phone several times a day and ordered a delivery service to bring their meals. Not just the odd meal; all their meals, every day.

She did not budge from the poolside, nor did she ever put down her phone. She was glued to it all day long, and she didn’t even stop when the doorbell rang and the Just Eat man tried to deliver the packages of sustenance for her husband and children.

The BB said he had been answering the door and finding the food on the doorstep. He would bring it in cold and she would fling it in the microwave, unless it was sushi, which it was, often.

He said he had never seen young children served so much sushi. They came down from their rooms, or wherever they were playing, and ate out of the delivery packets for every lunch and dinner. The kitchen was pristine, with every form of cooking implement and appliance, never used.

I have heard of several of my girlfriends starting to live like this. I don’t think it is because they are lazy per se. I think it is because they are simply unable to put down their iPhones for long enough to cook a meal, even if they once could.

It is becoming a skill long forgotten as they press the app for burgers and sushi while WhatsApping each other pictures of the sun.

My theory as to why the mobile phone has affected the female sex more than the male, for what it’s worth, is that women think laterally. The opportunity, therefore, to do more than one thing at once – to drive and take pictures, to shop online for new cushion covers while ordering dinner, for example –has done them in.

Men can only do one thing at a time, famously. And it is turning out to be their saving grace.

In the footsteps of Hemingway

‘They were living at le Grau du Roi then and the hotel was on a canal that ran from the walled city of Aigues Mortes straight down to the sea.’ So begins Hemingway’s posthumously published transgender-themed novel The Garden of Eden. He began writing it in 1946 and kept at it intermittently through his long mental and physical decline. Yet it’s a marvellous novel, in parts as vivid as Hemingway’s miraculous early stuff, which, once read, susceptible people confuse with their own lived experience.

In 1927 Hemingway and his second wife Pauline came to Grau-du-Roi on the Camargue coast for their honeymoon and the first three chapters of the novel are clearly based on that visit. As one of the susceptibles, I was very interested to see the canal, the lighthouse, the jetty, the beach and the hotel, and to experience the light and the wind, and to compare them with the indelible images and feelings planted in my head by a barmy old drunk clinging to the wreckage of his once great artistry.

He and Pauline stayed at the Hotel Bellevue d’Angleterre, an imposing old building on the canal at the heart of the fishing port. But two stars and some angry reviews put us off there and instead we chose the Hotel Café Miramar, a modern family hotel and restaurant further down the beach. We had a second-floor room with a sun trap balcony and wide sea-view. From here it was a short walk back along the water’s edge to the working port where the novel opens and we are introduced to the two young lovers, who are at it like a honeymoon couple in The Benny Hill Show.

‘It was late in the spring,’ intones the exhausted narrator, ‘and the mackerel were running and fishing people of the port were very busy.’ It was late spring for us too and we also found the fishing people of the port very busy. Trailing flocks of screaming gulls, the fishing boats came in from the open sea and chugged up the canal. One tied up opposite the Hotel Bellevue d’Angleterre and we stayed to watch the crew unload the catch. The faces and arms were burned nearly black by the sun and wind and they shouted as they flung the empty plastic crates around and heaved the silvery fish-filled ones up and over the side.

Then we walked further on up the white jetty to watch other boats steaming in and Catriona put up her red umbrella and stayed well back from the edge in case she was attacked or shat on by an overexcited gull. The violent wind and dazzling light and the maddened seagulls and the vastness of the sea and sky had a hallucinatory quality that made us feel friendly, cheerful and meditative all at the same time while we stayed at Grau-du-Roi.

As it is a Hemingway novel, the narrator casts a line from the jetty one morning and immediately hooks a monster sea bass. The fish is too strong to land alone so he plays and walks it along the jetty and into the canal and through the town as a throng of excited townsfolk gather to cheer and clap him on the back. Upstairs in the hotel his wife glances out of the window and is pleased but perhaps not surprised to see that her new husband is the town’s new fisher king. The sea bass is the largest caught on a hand line that anyone in the town can remember. It’s too big a trophy to be cut up, so it is packed in ice and sent away, maybe to a Paris restaurant. ‘Or maybe somebody very rich will buy him.’ This last because Hemingway is back on his usual carp about his natural talent being corrupted by the predatory wealthy.

So for his tea he settles for a representative, plate-sized sea bass.

‘The bass was grilled and the grill marks showed on the silver skin and the butter melted on the hot plate. There was sliced lemon to press on the bass and fresh bread from the bakery and the wine cooled their tongues of the heat of the fried potatoes.’

Catriona and I walked back to our hotel restaurant terrace for supper and were shown to a table lit by the last rays of the sun. At the next table the sun-blackened crew from the fishing boat that we’d watched unload were eating oysters and razor clams. At a farther table was a party of four silly drunk adults and a sober child who talked to the drunk adults respectfully as though they weren’t drunk at all.

We chose the sea bass. It was grilled and the grill marks showed on the silver skin and so on and so forth. Exactly the same. The sliced lemon, the fresh bread, the wine. Except the potatoes were mashed instead of fried.

And it was good.

Is Klaus Schwab the greatest threat of our time?

Alexandra rang me from London to enquire about a man by the name of Klaus Schwab: ‘He sounds like the greatest threat of our time. Should I be worried?’ ‘Nah,’ I answered. ‘He’s just another typical smooth-talking, smarmy Davos Man. ‘That’s what scares me,’ said the wife.

For the very few of you who have not heard of Klausie baby, he is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, or WEF, a grandiose title and well deserved to be sure, although it once created a social media video that contained the slogan: ‘You will own nothing, And you’ll be happy.’ The WEF is where technocratic dreams make contact with business and political biggies high up in the Swiss Alps. Personally, I think it’s a networking scam, and the media have for a long time shielded the public from its goals. Except when Forbes magazine published a WEF think piece back in 2016 headlined: ‘I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.’

Hence Alexandra’s worries about the kids and grandkids having nothing after reading about a future that is ‘a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres’, gobbledygook so typical of Davos and WEF slogans. I’m not so worried, but then I’m only a father and grandfather; mothers tend to fret more than us macho tough guys. What does worry me is globalisation, a sleight of hand by haves to have more, while small- town rubes get less. J.D. Vance, bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, has just won the Republican nomination for the Senate in Ohio, where millions upon millions of cars were built between the 1960s and 2000, until Nafta kicked in and 200,000 jobs went to Mexico and other such places. Trump was railing against such big-corporation shenanigans even when he was a private citizen, and Trump voters have carried and will carry Ohio in future. What’s so strange about that? After three generations of moulding steel, a family’s breadwinner loses his job but is expected to vote for some obedient woke deviant backed by the New Dentist (Yorker) or the Bagel Times? Poor white Americans may be scum to the media elite and Silicon Valley, but they’re still allowed to vote and vote they will.

And what left-behind Middle America will vote against are elites and the ruling class who have plundered the country. Multibillionaire investor Peter Thiel, who has backed the Donald in the past, is neither a fool nor a Trump tool, and will most likely come out for Trump again. Many of us are embarrassed by what Trump says and does, but we also recognise how far left the pendulum has swung under a media that see middle- and working-class whites as the enemy. Trump’s strength is the Forgotten Man. Let’s call him the Common Man. And by him I don’t mean that common little man who publishes the Bagel Times, I mean the law-abiding, proud-of-their-country’s-past, salt-of-the-earth American.

The Common Man respects institutions such as the Supreme Court, now under assault by the lefty media calling for change because the court ‘is too political’. The Senate filibuster and the Electoral College are also under attack by the usual suspects, institutions that have served Uncle Sam well for centuries. All this from those who call the 6 January riot in Washington an insurrection, while dismissing the deaths, arson and attacks on public buildings by anarchists following the killing of George Floyd. But let’s get back to Klaus’s worldview and my wife’s anxieties over the future of our children.

A clown by the name of Parag Khanna is the quintessential Davos Man. Klaus and he must think alike because they speak with the same forked tongue. Parag wants to see young people in the global south move en masse to the decrepit north. It’s called the Great Reset. Totally out of touch with normal human emotions, the bozo claims that the north has 300 million aging people and a decaying infrastructure, while two billion young people are sitting idly in the Middle East and South America. Let them all in, says the comedian. While Davos creeps discuss a sustainable future using phrases such as ‘physical, digital and biological identity’, I envisage Stalin’s forced labour transfers that produced nothing but human misery. As if we didn’t have enough troubles in this world.

Which brings me to what Alexandra should really be worrying about, not publicity-seekers such as Klaus and Parag, but war-crazy neocons and arms-industry lobbyists trying to get Uncle Sam even more involved in a possible nuclear exchange with Putin. These money-crazed zealots are reckless and totally unaware of history, especially of how the first world war began. Bragging to the news media how American know-how guided Ukrainians to kill Russian generals and sink Russian ships is as dumb as it gets. An unintended war with Russia would mean the end of the world. Zelensky should be told to shut up and to enjoy the billion Ukraine got from the Chinese construction of his country before it was deconstructed by Russia. Ukraine is not an American protectorate, and not even close to the American continent or interests. If Boris wants to get involved, let him go and volunteer for a mine-clearing detail. In the meantime, I want to enjoy my grandchildren in peace.

The Battle for Britain | 14 May 2022

Bridge | 14 May 2022

The Spring Fours is one of the great events in the English bridge calendar – a five-day knockout attracting many international stars. This year, it was won by Frances Hinden’s team. Superb bridge was played all round – not just by Team Hinden, but all the runners-up, too. As ever, luck played its role – and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Janet de Botton’s team, who seemed sure of getting through to the semi-finals until a dollop of misfortune fell their way. Going into the final stanza of the quarter-finals, they were 30 points up against Richard Plackett’s team. When you’re that far ahead, with only eight boards to go, you try and play ‘safe’: you can afford some losses, but no big swings or heavy penalties. So what do you do when a vulnerable grand slam beckons: do you go for it, or settle for a small slam? It depends, of course, on how good the odds are – and also on whether you think it will be bid in the other room. Thor-Erik Hoftaniska was faced with that dilemma:

Thor-Erik’s 4◆ showed shortage; South cuebid 4♥, then showed three key-cards. Now came the decisive moment. The grand depended on South’s club holding. Thor-Erik continued with 6♣, a conventional bid asking South whether he had third-round control (a singleton, doubleton or the ♣Q). He did – and jumped to 7♠. It was a fantastic slam – better than 85%. But when clubs broke 5-1 it had to go down. Meanwhile, in the other room, NS stopped in 6♠. That meant a loss of 17 points. De Botton went on to lose the match by three. Bridge is a beautiful game – but can be so harsh.

Messy family matters: Bad Relations, by Cressida Connolly, reviewed

Cressida Connolly’s new novel begins with a couple of endings. It’s spring 1855, and on the battlefields of the Crimea William Gale is mourning the deaths of his brother Algernon and his friend Mr Lockwood. He writes to his wife Alice, who back home has befriended the progressive Dr Nolan, and asks her to call on Mrs Lockwood in Cheltenham. Upon returning from the war a medalled hero, William isn’t himself, and after meeting the ‘good lady’ widow and her two little girls, Molly and Kitty, he makes a rash decision that reverberates across generations.

It’s hard not to play favourites with a novel divided into three fairly distinct parts, and I admit I would happily have spent all 280 pages of Bad Relations in Part Two. The year is 1977 and William’s descendants have invited Stephen Nolan, a thoughtful art school drop-out (and a distant relative) to help on the family farm in Cornwall. Enamoured of the charismatic Clarke girls, Cass and Georgie, and Georgie’s London friend Helena, Stephen spends the summer in an acid- and sex-fuelled haze, which is abruptly brought to a tragic close.

It’s testament to Connolly that each section can be appreciated both on its own and as a part of a well-matched triptych. The panoramic tale is told in the close third person, the voice shifting to suit the times. Throughout are sweet and funny observations: Alice’s feelings are like ‘a bramble spilling over a broken wall, a tangle of leaves and reaching stalks, hidden thorns, bright tiny insects moving among the small white flowers’; Dr Nolan is ‘one of those unfortunates whom nature required to shave twice a day if he were to maintain a semblance of neatness’; and Stephen is dazzled by Cass’s looks – ‘the kind of beauty that you saw on the posters advertising foreign films’ – then relieved to find that she walks with ‘a sort of trudge, head forward, that was reassuringly like a human girl’.

Part Three transports us to 2017 and throws light on the consequences of William’s actions and those of his descendants. Stephen’s sister, Hazel, retraces the family tree and sits down with Cass and Georgie, both adults now with children of their own, to reflect. This is an Atonement-like novel about the messy stuff that is family life: distant relatives, inheritance, memory and half-told truths. It’s about what and who we choose to remember, and the things best left in the past. Besides, as Hazel soon realises: ‘You could never find out everything.’

A bitter sectarian divide: Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart, reviewed

Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize, creates vivid characters, settings and images without letting his literary skill get in the way of plot. His second novel, Young Mungo, has a similar feel and is in many ways a kind of sequel. The characters are different, as is the Glaswegian housing scheme and the year – we are now in 1993 rather than the 1980s – but the milieu is familiar.

The protagonist, Mungo Hamilton, is a frail, fatherless 15-year-old, but appears much younger. His complexion, vocal tic and poor-fitting clothes lead people to think he’s ‘thirteen, tops’. Early on he’s described as a ‘waif’ – a Dickensian word that alerts the reader to the tenor of the novel.

The story begins with Mungo’s often-absent mother coercing him to go for a weekend of fishing and camping with two lager-swilling men she knows from Alcoholics Anonymous. Her plan is for ‘St Christopher’, ‘an angular man in his late fifties or early sixties…withered and jaundiced by neglectful eating and hard drinking’, and ‘Gallowgate’, a twentysomething with ‘arms roped with lean muscle that spoke to a heavy trade, or years of fighting, or both’ to ‘make a man’ of her son. In parallel chapters, Stuart describes how Mungo got to this juncture. Decisive are two relationships: one with James, a pigeon-keeping Catholic boy from across the housing scheme; the other with Hamish, Mungo’s older brother and the leader of the local Protestant gang.

The novel is darker than Shuggie Bain, but Stuart retains the ingenious Wodehousian similes that characterise his prose. Mungo has a ‘face that looked like he might sneeze, but never would’ and St Christopher has a ‘yellow face, wrinkling like an overripe apple’. Such imagery coaxes the reader through some of the denser passages. Every detail has a purpose. Mungo, named after the patron saint of Glasgow (known for resurrecting a robin), falls in love with James, the bird-keeper. Like those supported by St Mungo’s charity, Stuart’s protagonist, who lacks parental guidance and struggles against his brother’s expectations of muscular masculinity, doesn’t have a home. He is most comfortable in James’s pigeon coop, but knows that trespassing across the sexual and sectarian divide will inflame Hamish. Throughout, Mungo is torn between these two male figures who may share a name (Hamish is the Scottish version of James) but are archetypal antitheses.

Shuggie Bain indicated the arrival of a major literary talent, but Young Mungo is more elegant, and its similarities to the former novel in style, setting and themes do not lessen its merits.

Snafu at Slough House: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron, reviewed

Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it: here’s mine. Anyone who tries to understand modern Britain through its fiction but overlooks Mick Herron’s satirical thrillers merits a punishment posting to the critics’ version of Slough House. That noxious midden of a building opposite the Barbican, its leprous chambers groaning like ‘the internal organs of some giant, diseased beast’, is a sort of landfill site for failed spies. Herron first opened its flaking doors in 2010 with his novel Slow Horses.

Seven books later, his squad of borderline sociopath rejects from polite espionage has risen to the dignity of a luxury cast series on Apple TV+. But the sheer joy of Herron’s bunch of disgraced ‘weirdos and misfits’ comes not just from slyly booby-trapped plots and venom-tipped character drawing. Snappily paced, his comic prose fizzes with an epigrammatic chutzpah, softened by elegiac grace notes.

Meanwhile, magical thinking – or rather plotting – kicks in to ensure that Herron’s whipped underdogs regularly trounce the pedigree chums of privilege and power. If John le Carré’s secret agents played an almost gentlemanly ‘great game’ of Cold War subterfuge, the inmates of Slough House fester amid the debris of a chaotic new world order. Every division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has melted into a rancorous, treacherous free-for-all of lethal office politics. In Bad Actors, a senior spook recalls the summing-up he added to the post-mortem on another botched op. It read: ‘Don’t use humans.’

Humans, alas, are all Jackson Lamb has on his books. He is the corpulent, flatulent, potty-mouthed ringmaster of the security service’s underperforming ‘slow horses’. Call him Falstaffian if you wish, although his repartee edges closer to Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s. In this outing, Lamb must outmanoeuvre Downing Street’s ‘home-grown Napoleon’ of a chief adviser, the ‘charmless bully’ Anthony Sparrow. A trophy ‘superforecaster’ hired by Sparrow has gone awol, while a top Russian spy slips into London as his Kremlin master grows reckless. (‘The closer he gets to the end of his reign, the more blood there’ll be in the gutters.’) Diana Taverner, icily scheming ‘First Desk’ on the respectable side of the spook business, remains Lamb’s go-to frenemy, as a tsunami-like ‘fetish for disruption’ rolls across Westminster and Whitehall. Herron’s capers reflect recent headlines as if in the trick mirrors of a run-down funhouse.

Mordant political takedowns alone would never give the series its legs. Herron, in Wodehouse or Pratchett mode, fashions a self-sustaining comic realm. His slow horses always screw up, but come good. They have a new recruit to torment – the dentist’s daughter Ashley Khan, whom Lamb greets by breaking her arm. (‘She’s still on about that? Bloody snowflake.’) In niftily choreographed fight scenes, the crew battle Sparrow’s thugs in Wimbledon and Dorset, though as ever it’s the line-by-line hits of patter and backchat – part-Noël Coward, part-Joe Orton – that spritz every page. ‘He’s a treasure,’ says Lamb about the tragic incel hacker Roddy Ho, one of his fallen stars: ‘I plan to bury him someday.’ Whereas Herron’s own tarnished stones look good to roll for many episodes to come.

A meditation on exile and the meaning of home

What does home mean? Where your dead are buried, as Zulus believe? Or where you left your heart, as a migrant’s saying goes? In these pages William Atkins melds history, biography and travel into a meditation on exile and the meaning of home. It is a volume for our times, as the author seeks to reveal ‘something about the nature of displacement itself’.

Part One introduces the three 19th-century political exiles who form the spine of the book. Louise Michel (1830-1905), the illegitimate daughter of a maid in Haute-Marne, became an anarchist and Communard, who murdered policemen with her Remington carbine. Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo (1868-1913), the young king of the Zulu nation, took up arms to resist southern Africa’s colonial overlords. The Ukrainian-born socialist revolutionary Lev Shternberg (1861-1927) committed himself to the overthrow of tsarism. All three were packed off to remote islands, each a banished exile similar to a Roman relegatio like Ovid, whom Atkins invokes.

In Part Two, the author, whose previous books include The Immeasurable World, an account of seven desert journeys, fills out the three periods of exile and follows in the footsteps of his rebels. In the French colony of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, 17,000 miles from Paris, Michel studied papaya jaundice and tried to farm silkworms. Dinuzulu departed for the British dependency of St Helena in the South Atlantic, 2,500 miles from home, travelling on a mail ship (as I did: in my case the last one, in 2016). There he and his 13-strong retinue hosted a party for Queen Victoria’s birthday. The St Helena Guardian praised Dinuzulu’s dignity. He wrote home: ‘I am like the fly wrapped round in the spider’s web, though its heart is yet alive.’

Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, ‘a byword for bleakness and isolation’, lies 28 miles north of Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk. Shternberg went there, 11,000 miles from home. He devoted himself to ethnography and produced a study of the Nivkhi people, known to Chekhov as Gilyak: Anton Pavlovich made Sakhalin famous when he published a book on the penal colony in 1893 (he overlapped with Shternberg, but the pair never met).

Atkins is a character in the story rather than an agent of the material: in effect he becomes the book’s fourth protagonist, weaving his experiences with those of his subjects, making links between him and them (‘during their sea voyages they are freed to occupy a common realm outside space and time’). He is an amiable companion, deploying an engaging conversational tone (‘I have the feeling… ’) and positioning himself as far as he can from the I’ve-Got-a-Big-One tribe of white chumps in remote lands. At a party ‘in the absolute shade characteristic of banyans’ in New Caledonia, he hears a Kanak telling his neighbour: ‘If he [Atkins] doesn’t dance I’ll kill him.’

It is hard to jemmy travelogue into historical material. Even though the author labours at his links with determination and intelligence, the transitions don’t always work. The effort slows the narrative. But Atkins hears echoes of the past in the present – as the rest of us could all the time if we listened.

Michel emerges as the fullest character, because she left more primary material, notably a published memoir. Atkins marshals that and all his sources adroitly. He is an able writer, picking the fertile fact from the heap of negligible things. Michel’s friend Victor Hugo said he had to eat rat pâté during the Commune; Atkins has ‘latex sausage’ on the overnight ferry from Vanino to Sakhalin.

Part Three covers the post-exile periods. A crowd of 20,000 met the 50-year-old Michel and her five cats at Saint-Lazare seven years after she had sailed away. (Streets and schools carry her name today.) She continued living a public life as a radical activist, often from a prison cell. When the 38-year-old Dinuzulu steamed back to Africa after seven years on St Helena, his entourage swollen by progeny and five donkeys, a boundary commission had divided his kingdom into dozens of petty chiefdoms. Home was no longer home, and things went badly for him. As for Shternberg, away for eight years, Engels’s proto-ethnography had influenced him, and when the German read his Sakhalin field reports, he rejoiced that they supported the Marxist theory of social evolution. Shternberg’s Social Organisation of the Gilyak People came out in 1905.

Atkins says he was drawn to his subjects because ‘their lives were shaped by three winds that blow strongly today – nationalism, autocracy and imperialism’. He wrote memorably in The Immeasurable World about the migrant crisis, in that case the Mexican tragedy in Arizona. This new book ends with the assertion that his own nostalgia, evoked by the voyages described, is for ‘a country that no longer exists’ – his own, the sceptred one that for so long welcomed strangers and exiles: the safe harbour.

The problem with Nicola Sturgeon’s latest independence drive

The Scottish government will start refreshing the ‘very positive case’ for exiting the UK, Nicola Sturgeon said this week, in the aftermath of Scotland’s local council elections.

Can we expect anything radical to come out of this series of papers? Will there be a big departure from the last major overhaul of the independence pitch, the 2018 SNP-commissioned Sustainable Growth Commission report? That report advocated an emerging market-style currency arrangement – with Scotland unofficially using pound sterling for a prolonged period after secession – and a decade of austerity to put the new state’s public finances in shape. Perhaps Nicola Sturgeon will now drop this foolishness and push instead for a new Scottish currency on day one of independence, with a commitment to a massive borrowing programme in that new currency?

The other question is whether realism will finally replace wishful thinking. A truthful independence plan would accept the high probability of the new state dealing with a severe financial crisis in the months or even weeks after official secession day. It would reflect on the likely need for a raft of emergency measures, like capital controls to stem the flow of currency out of the economy, or special provisions for state sector employees and their families should the government find it impossible to pay their wages at any time.

There will of course be none of this. The new blueprint will most likely be much like the old ones: big on utopianism and short on pragmatism. There will be one difference this time, however, which is that even as the SNP has remained steadfast in its monomania, the world around the party has shifted.

Scotland today is in the grip of three national emergencies: the cost of living crisis, the post-Covid recovery crisis, and the climate emergency. Given this context, the idea that the country will put itself through another traumatic referendum within the next 19 months, and then cut its economy off from its central bank, currency base, treasury and expansive tax base sometime in 2025, seems preposterous.

Take just one of those crises: the post-pandemic recovery. This week Dr Graeme Eunson, chair of the British Medical Association’s Scottish consultants’ committee, described the situation in Scotland’s accident and emergency departments as ‘horrific’, stating that a workforce that was already stretched prior to the pandemic is finding it impossible to catch up.

Examine any part of the health service and you will find it on its knees. The latest Public Health Scotland report on waiting times for key diagnostic tests is frightening. Over 140,000 patients in Scotland are waiting to be seen for eight key diagnostic tests, such as endoscopies and MRI scans. Compared to pre-pandemic levels, the waiting list size is almost 60 per cent higher than the 12-month average prior to Covid.

This is a disease timebomb waiting to explode. It will take years of careful management, without rocking the boat elsewhere, just to get these services back on a stable footing. Yet Nicola Sturgeon insists that sometime in 2025 the key institutions that guarantee funding for Scotland’s NHS will be taken out of the picture and replaced with a central bank that cannot issue currency and a treasury that will be severely hampered in its borrowing capacity.

This is likely to be a decade of crises. The SNP-Green coalition plan to create another self-inflicted crisis via independence can only fairly be described as deranged. And that’s before we even consider the new challenges to western collective security presented by Russian aggression and the SNP-Green threat to the nuclear deterrent, which could destabilise Nato.

Thankfully, there are signs the people of Scotland have more sense than their current government. A new Survation poll, produced for the campaigning organisation Scotland in Union, finds that only 29 per cent of Scots agree with Sturgeon’s position that there should be another referendum before the end of 2023.

Only one in ten Scots think another referendum should be in the Scottish government’s top-three priorities, far behind the NHS (61 per cent), the economy and jobs (48 per cent) and Covid recovery (30 per cent). The same survey asked the question: ‘Should Scotland remain a part of the United Kingdom or leave the United Kingdom?’. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would vote to remain, while 42 per cent said they would vote to leave.

There is no ambiguity as to what Scotland wants. It’s a pity the Sturgeon administration places its narrow ideological aims above the will and the welfare of the people.

Sadiq and Nicola’s American sojourns

Junkets are like buses: you wait ages for one to come along and then two do at once. For this month, it’s not just London mayor Sadiq Khan on a transatlantic taxpayer-funded jolly: Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon launches her American charm offensive next week too. Good thing that all is going well currently in both parts of the UK then. While both politicians sit for different parties in different assemblies, they both share a similar love of the limelight, with a penchant for selfies, statements and sojourns abroad. And it’s for that reason that both politicians are seeking to go above and beyond their constitutional remits on both their respective trips.

Take Sadiq Khan, the achingly right-on manager of the metropolis. As part of his five-day tour of the US, he is currently out in Los Angeles where yesterday he toured a marijuana farm and retailer. Khan’s visit signals that he will seek to push for legalisation of the class B drug, with the London mayor announced that Sir Keir’s chum Lord Falconer will chair London’s first commission to examine the effectiveness of drug laws in the UK. There is just one slight drawback: the mayor of London does not actually have the power to decriminalise drugs. Instead Khan merely ‘hopes that the findings will influence future government policy.’ Perhaps Khan might want to focus on tackling the crimes he is responsible for, rather than reviewing laws over which he has no jurisdiction?

Nicola Sturgeon meanwhile is very much the queen of deflection, having spent much of her leadership talking about every issue other than those in her remit. Her five-day ‘indy tour’ is set to see her meet with congressional groups to discuss ‘issues of climate, energy security and the war in Ukraine’ and ‘ways to create a greener, fairer and more equitable economy with executives of companies operating across the Atlantic.’ Lucky them. It follows the launch of Scotland’s Global Affairs Framework and a fresh push to spend Scottish taxpayers’ issue on yet another pet project. 

Steerpike can’t help but think however that such conversations in America are unlikely to be fruitful – given that foreign policy is a reserved matter, no matter how much the SNP pretends it isn’t. And while much of Britain’s fiscal fire power remains with Rishi Sunak’s Treasury, the nationalists in Scotland have shown remarkably little interest in playing with the tools already at their disposal, despite having the power to raise or reduce income tax. Nicola can meet as many chief executives as she wants but if the captains of industry really want a ‘greener, fairer and more equitable economy’ they may prefer to deal directly with the stewards of the world’s sixth best economy in London.

Is it too much to hope perhaps that either leader simply focus on the job they were elected to do, rather than gallivanting about on the world stage, pretending to be something they’re not? Mr S won’t hold his breath.