Sentenced to chicken: NoMad reviewed

NoMad is a new hotel in what used to be Bow Street Magistrates’ Court: a preening piece of mid-Victorian classicism opposite the Royal Opera House that is clearly too fine for the half-hearted criminal classes these days. I was judged in this court once for the very boring crime of cannabis possession (I think I did it), as was Giles Coren for something else (he says: ‘I never done nuffink’), General Pinochet, Dr Crippen (VeryMad) and Oscar Wilde. It heard its last case in 2006: the breaching of an Asbo by a man called Jason. Now it sells cocktails.

NoMad has a restaurant named, as if in homage to a public relations panic attack, the NoMad Restaurant. (I thought NoMad was named after a refugee but I checked and I was wrong.) It offers ‘the interplay between grand and intimate, classical and colloquial, festive moments of revelry and quiet meals that nourish the spirit’. I’m not sure about the adjective pile-up — was anyone injured? — or if the spirit can be nourished in central London anymore, but it is beautiful, certainly: a plant-filled three-storey atrium. All interesting London buildings become restaurants in the end: a kind of food-themed destiny. Each house Karl Marx lived in is now a restaurant, a bar or a private members club. I did the tour.

NoMad has not followed the Yard at the Great Scotland Yard Hotel, formerly the Central Detective Unit of the Met, which is morbid and velvet, filled with relics of Death and chairs that look like Mr Men without faces. That would be too pleasing and too easy: but I love themed restaurants. At least they know what they are. NoMad is for the rich and fashionable — by which I mean the socially anxious who absolutely do not know what they are, they treat Tatler headlines as religious edicts — and so, being childlike, they seek no reminder of it. No cushion jigsaws of a dach-shund for them.

Instead, we have immaculate good taste: the kind that Prince Charles has, which is also the reason that he is so widely mistrusted. There is pale green ironwork and heavy Edwardian-style lamps; marble and brickwork; interior windows and plants, which are enjoying a small renaissance in fashionable circles, probably due to the press coverage of COP26. The menu is weird, inspired by map fragments: caviar; sea bream; suckling pig.

I come early, like a governess, and admire the immaculate good taste. I’m not against good taste — or not very against it — but there is a sameness to it which is a denial of what was once, and still should be, a very individual city. Lovely as this restaurant is — and it is lovely — it was more interesting when Dr Crippen was here. But you can’t eat Dr Crippen unless you are Dr Crippen.

Instead we eat NoMad roast chicken, which is what you call a signature dish if you are an idiot. It’s a famous chicken and as a Jew I do not say that lightly. It is certainly classical and colloquial; grand, intimate and festive. It is stuffed with foie gras and black truffle. What to say about this dead celebrity chicken with its own PR staff? It is overflavoured (some chefs use black truffles the way children use finger paints) and rather damp. Pudding is better: an exquisite banana and pecan cake, but pastry chefs are the true artists of the age.

And so another public building falls to fashion. One day Pentonville Prison will spin itself into a hotel, but I hope I will be dead by then. You can’t even be sentenced in a Grade II building anymore. I ask the chicken: where is our civilisation’s sense of occasion?

Racism, cricket and the problem with ancient allegations

Last week, the former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan revealed that he’d been accused by another cricketer — Azeem Rafiq — of having said something racist to him and two other Asian players 12 years ago. According to Rafiq, when Vaughan was playing for Yorkshire in 2009 he said to the three as they walked out on to the field together to face Nottinghamshire that there were ‘too many of you lot, we need to do something about it’.

Vaughan categorically denies saying this and it’s difficult to evaluate the veracity of the accusation because Rafiq hasn’t made it against him publicly. Rather, he named Vaughan behind closed doors while giving evidence to an independent panel set up by Yorkshire Country Cricket Club in which he also accused other players of making similar remarks.

The internal investigation was launched after Rafiq gave interviews to Wisden and other outlets last year saying that ‘institutional racism’ at the club was worse ‘than it’s ever been’ and had caused him so much pain during his Yorkshire career that he came close to committing suicide. He also brought a compensation claim against the club at an employment tribunal — a case which the new chairman Lord Patel settled earlier the week — and the same allegation against Vaughan may have formed part of that complaint.

This affair illustrates one of the difficulties of accusing a person of saying something racist more than a decade ago: that people’s memories become less reliable over time. If someone was tried in a criminal case 12 years after the fact and the only evidence was the testimony of a prosecution witness, it would be difficult for the jury to conclude that the defendant was guilty beyond reasonable doubt — particularly after the witness had been cross-examined by a skilled defence barrister. But no such protections exist in a workplace investigation, where the test is the balance of probabilities. How will the independent panel set up by Yorkshire decide whose recollection is more accurate, Rafiq’s or Vaughan’s? I don’t envy them that task.

To my mind, this is a strong argument for a statute of limitations on such accusations. I’m thinking of a new rule, enshrined in employment law, whereby someone cannot be subject to a workplace investigation for having supposedly said something offensive or inappropriate more than five years ago. If an allegation is going to be made, let it be made in a timely fashion so the panel looking into it can call on witnesses whose memories of events are relatively fresh. Failing that, the risk of an innocent person being punished seems too great.

Of course, in some cases there is documentary evidence in the form of social media posts. In September, the Middlesbrough defender Marc Bola was charged by the FA with ‘aggravated’ misconduct for a tweet he sent in 2012 that included a reference to sexual orientation. In his case, the argument for not putting him through the wringer is that he was 14 at the time. Can it be right to punish adults for things they said as children? The same employment law should prohibit someone being investigated by their employer for breaching a speech code before they turned 18.

What if the miscreant was an adult at the time they committed the sin and there’s documentary evidence? Should there be a statute of limitations even then? I think there should. When the offence archaeologists did a number on me at the beginning of 2018, one of the crimes they dredged up was something I’d written in 1987 for a book called The Oxford Myth. Punishing a person for something they said 31 years ago does seem excessive, not least because what is socially acceptable shifts over time. Again, a limit of about five years seems about right, given how quickly these norms can change. Perhaps the next person to lose their livelihood for historical social media posts could bring a case against the leader of the twitchfork mob in the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that such a deep dive into their past is a breach of their right to privacy.

I realise these proposals will be controversial, because they would prevent people being held to account for saying racist or homophobic or misogynistic things in the relatively recent past — maybe the time limit should be extended to ten years for serious offences. But scarcely a week passes without someone being cancelled for historical social media posts, and we need to rein in this moral Inquisition.

Bankers, not Greta, will save the planet

I have observed before how useful really big numbers can be in response to crises: when US treasury secretary Hank Paulson unveiled his $700 billion Wall Street bailout package in 2008, an aide famously let slip that the number had been pulled out of the air because it sounded reassuringly huge. Now we’re told that more than 450 banks and investment firms representing $130 trillion of assets (that’s 40 per cent of global savings, give or take a few soaring bitcoins) have joined the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero led by Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg, who tell us that ramping up clean energy fast enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change will require new investment, mostly from the private sector, ‘likely in the ballpark of $100 trillion’.

So the $130 trillion already committed is bigger than the $100 trillion needed? And the City of London, rebranded by Rishi Sunak as ‘the world’s first net-zero financial centre’, is honing its celebrated innovation skills to lead us all to safety? Phew, that’s a relief — or perhaps not quite.

Cynics have pointed out that fossil-fuel industry delegates outnumbered any other mission to COP26 and that signatories to the groups which make up Carney’s alliance, having provided $4 trillion of funding for coal, oil and gas projects since 2015, are not barred from providing more. This year’s quadrupling of carbon energy prices also happens to have made those projects increasingly attractive to the sort of money that does not sign up to virtuous alliances at all. ‘Hedge funds flock to oil as energy shortages worsen’ was a recent Reuters headline, while US private equity firms continue quietly buying up the coal mines and coal-fired power plants that public citizens of the financial world are now embarrassed to own.

So should we expect as little impact from the finance piece of COP26 as from, say, the pledge to end deforestation — which seems only likely to happen if Brazilian and Indonesian loggers are literally bribed to stop? Again, perhaps not quite. Major banks and the investment firms that manage our pensions and savings are among the most regulated businesses on the planet as well as the most sensitive to the whims and demands of shareholders and customers. The climate action agenda has sufficient momentum that no public-facing brand in this or any other sector can afford to be seen as a laggard.

Those big numbers bandied in Glasgow may prove as evanescent as the rhetoric of Barack Obama and Greta Thunberg. But China and India apart, the movement is very largely in one direction and the private sector is leading it. You’ll be surprised to hear me say this, but if anyone can save the world, it’s most likely the bankers.

Under fire

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey (of whom I may say more next week) is under fire for not raising interest rates. Last week’s Monetary Policy Committee decision — 7-2 for holding the base rate at 0.1 per cent, where it has sat since March last year — wasn’t determined by his personal vote. But the market, including mortgage lenders, felt he’d given a strong signal of a counter-inflationary rise to 0.25 per cent. And when that didn’t happen the pound fell, adding to inflation by increasing import costs.

The explanation for delaying a rate rise is that economic recovery is weaker than it first looked and an immediate increase in borrowing costs, on top of energy price hikes, might have tipped it back further. Meanwhile the Bank says it thinks inflation will peak at 5 per cent next April before starting to fall as supply and labour shortages ease. But what if inflation goes higher for longer, as some of us expect, and hesitant, fractional rises have little impact on it?

‘We’re not going back… to 4 or 5 per cent [interest rates]’ as a norm, Bailey told the Today programme. As for inflation: ‘We’re not going back to the 1970s.’ But what tools does he have left in his box? As his predecessor Mervyn King once said, forecasting is a mug’s game: but I predict Bailey will be taking flak in a year’s time that will make last week’s salvo look tame.

Caught out

Yorkshire County Cricket Club, up to its neck in racism allegations, has lost the sponsorship of two of the county’s most admired businesses. Yorkshire Tea is a product of the family-run, Harrogate-based group, also including Taylors coffee and Bettys teashops, which prides itself on high ethical standards and benign links with growers in India and Kenya. Emerald is an academic publishing enterprise in Bingley that was founded by a friend of mine, Keith Howard — who died in August aged 89 having given £10 million for the redevelopment of Yorkshire’s Headingley stadium, partly to ensure its facilities stayed up to scratch for Test matches.

Keith would be appalled to know that the ECB has suspended the club from hosting international fixtures — and deeply saddened by the whole episode, which carries a curious echo of his own youthful experience. Opening the bowling for Leeds Grammar School against an eleven fielded by the great pre-war Yorkshire and England batsman Herbert Sutcliffe, he had Sutcliffe himself caught on the boundary for a duck. Sutcliffe then arranged a trial for Keith in the Headingley nets — but hopes that the youngster might play for Yorkshire were swiftly crushed, for the simple reason that he had been born in Lancashire.

His, hers and theirs

Marks & Spencer’s decision to allow pronoun choices such as ‘He/Him/His’ on staff name badges is a sign of the times that may occasionally be helpful for shortsighted customers but won’t make much difference if Christmas shelves are empty of pigs in blankets and bacon-wrapped stuffing parcels. And I think Dear Mary needs to tell us how to respond correctly to the helpful assistant whose badge says ‘They/Them/Their’: is it ‘Thank you both very much’?

The dangerous pleasure of hating men

I have Netflix, and in particular the series Maid, to thank for the startling discovery of how easy it is to slide into a form of man-hating — not a righteous feminist rage, but a sort of dopey, palliative, unthinking misandry.

Maid was released last month, and it’s already one of the stand-out Netflix successes of 2021. (It was announced last week that it’s set to take over Queen’s Gambit as the most-watched Netflix miniseries.) The show is catnip for women, and after several late nights, letting one episode tip into another, I can see why. It’s based on the real-life memoir of a woman in the US who fled an abusive boyfriend and supported herself and her small daughter by working as a cleaner. It stars Andie MacDowell’s daughter Margaret Qualley, with Andie herself as the destructive, bipolar (but still hot) mum.

Maid is well-written and well-acted, but the secret of its success lies somewhere quite different. The distinctive thing about it is that every male character is an absolute horror. I mean: every single one. There’s the abusive babyfather who swings between violence and remorse; the maid’s own father, another wife-beater; and a slew of shifty, venal stepdads. The bit-part men are shockers too: uncaring landlords, supercilious doctors. Even the men we never meet but merely hear discussed are abusive. The only male initially appearing decent is a chap called Nate who saves our heroine from homelessness. But then he boots her out again because she won’t sleep with him. (‘Classic toxic knight-saviour,’ according to social media.)

Maid is ‘hard to watch but it’s important,’ said the reviews. Well, that’s straight untrue. Maid is frighteningly easy to watch, which is why it’s so popular, but also why it’s pernicious. This is misandry shot and presented as an empowering chick-flick. Settle in, make popcorn, enjoy the intoxicating feeling of sticking it to men, all men.

And I’m afraid I did. After watching the show, I drank the Kool-Aid, just a little, and it tasted good. I asked my husband how it felt to be part of the oppressor class. I accused him of mansplaining — and as the word came out of my mouth, it felt round and satisfying. I looked back at any odd, unasked-for lunge in my past and saw it suddenly as part of a continuum of male sin that ends in wife-beating. I quite forgot that men ever suffer at the hands of women, and that women can be as vicious as a sack of rats.

My power trip lasted for 24 hours. At breakfast the following day, it occurred to me that I wasn’t remotely oppressed and I also began to see why Maid had had the effect that it did. Netflix is offering an analgesic. If you persuade women that all men are bad, then all women instantly become victims. And if you’re a victim, all the free-floating guilt — about privilege, about the planet, about parenting — simply disappears.

I suspect it’s everywhere now, this almost invisible bigotry, streamed into our psyches via Netflix and Amazon Prime — what the French philosopher Élisabeth Badinter calls ‘the binary thinking of belligerent neofeminism’. There was the 2019 Charlie’s Angels for instance; and that DC spin-off, Birds of Prey: two hours without a single redeeming man. And how could it be otherwise? Think of all the forces at work, tugging at the minds of scriptwriters, producers and shareholders. There’s so much dosh to be made selling bogus solidarity to women sitting alone on sofas. Then there are the ‘sensitivity readers’. Someone should make a horror film called The Sensitivity Readers.

Am I wrong to worry? My female friends think so. When I complain to them about Maid, they say that it’s a true story and that domestic abuse is a serious issue which should be better understood. That’s beside the point, say I. The series is like a Cadbury selection box of male sin — no vice is left unrepresented.

Can you for a nanosecond imagine anyone today making a miniseries about the iniquities of women, starring a blameless man? Go on, try. We’ll call it Barista and here’s the elevator pitch: an attractive young man with a drunk, coercive girlfriend runs away from her one night with his baby boy. His mother won’t help him because she’s a drunk too. He survives by working in coffee shops but loses custody because the man-hating female judge is set against him. All the women he dates are manipulative and avaricious, but in the end he finds fulfilment in an all-male self-help group for the victims of female psychos. What do you think? Will it sell?

Oddly, most people I’ve spoken to needed no persuading that men were being given short shrift on screen but the consensus was that this wasn’t unfair, it was simply payback. For at least a century, women have been misrepresented on screen, they said. Male directors have made films by male writers presenting women as men want to see them. It’s time to redress the balance. What a strange way to think. Should we burn men because men once burnt witches? Take their votes away, and perhaps their children? And what about our teens, quietly absorbing this skewed reality and taking it for fact?

In the 1980s, the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel proposed a test for measuring the representation of women in fiction. A book or film would only pass, she said, if it featured at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Bechdel was joking at the time, but this became known as ‘the Bechdel test’ and is now widely used.

I think, come 2022, we’re going to need another version of the Bechdel test, but this time in defence of men. If any film or series contains not one single male character who isn’t either useless or evil, it fails. For want of a better idea we could call it the Maid test.

Kamala Harris and the problem with racist trees

I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I have always held trees in the deepest suspicion: it is their long-abiding silences which worry me. As we know from Black Lives Matter, ‘Silence is violence’ — and trees, for literally aeons, have been conspicuously silent on the matter of white privilege and racism. To follow this logic, then, trees are inherently violent. Nasty, leafy bastards.

This certainly seems to be what Ms Harris thinks. During a visit to Nasa, instead of asking those space boys how to reverse park a shuttle, she instead became obsessed with keeping an eye on trees. Referring to a satellite she was being told about she said: ‘Can you measure trees — part of that data that you are referring to, [and it’s an issue of] EJ, environmental justice — that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighbourhoods where people live?’

In other words she had identified trees as being racist. Her point was that white people get to live in places where there are more trees than there are in predominantly black neighbourhoods. I fear that this is true and it seems likely to me that the trees, being racist, move out of certain areas when they see black folks moving in. They up their roots and skedaddle. It is the arboreal equivalent of white flight. Any good liberal would recognise that the only answer to this is Affirmative Deforestation (AD) and the ‘bussing’ of trees into areas where more black folks live. Either that or I suppose bus the black people into areas where there are lots of trees. I would prefer the former option because it would teach those racist trees a valuable lesson.

I fervently hope the Democrats make AD an important part of their platform because, as Ms Harris was speaking, thousands of swing voters from Juneau to Jacksonville finally conceded that most of the Democratic party are on a one-way ticket to the booby hatch. They have become obsessive and deranged over race, perpetually seeking new hitherto undreamed-of ways in which to ramp up the victimhood and create more division between black and white, because there can never be quite enough — and almost all of it based on lies, falsehoods, non sequiturs and delusions. So, a strong commitment on behalf of the Democrats to end white domination of silviculture, plus compulsory reverse mentoring of the trees themselves by people of colour, might just persuade another million or so US voters to go Republican. The Democrats would be following a noble path: it is now more than two years since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided that cauliflowers were racist and yet since then little has been done to root out bigotry among American vegetation.

The soft left insists that none of this stuff matters. By soft left I don’t mean the maniacs who promote this sort of hilarious bilge, but their useful-idiot fellow travellers who may occasionally be slightly embarrassed by what John Gray calls hyper–liberalism in the field of, say, gender or race but kid themselves that it doesn’t matter to the average voter.

For example, earlier this year the Fabian Society published a report which the Guardian claimed proved that hardly anyone cares about the culture wars, while reporting that a significant tranche of the population had never even heard of stuff like cultural appropriation. The suggestion is that the right rages about this stuff but people are perfectly happy to go along with it and that this supposed ‘war’ has been confected by the right, not the left. Another delusion: stuff happens on the left and the right reacts to it, usually with incredulity.

The notion, though, that nobody really cares about the ‘culture wars’ is a patent falsehood. The public may not know the terms and the vocabulary of the mentalist left and in some cases — such as the ludicrous notion of ‘environmental justice’ — think that it all sounds very reasonable. But care they most certainly do — as 2 November’s gubernatorial vote in Virginia demonstrated very handily. Virginia is a deep blue state and has been since 2008. Last year Joe Biden won it by a margin of 10.1 per cent. But last week Republican Glenn Youngkin beat his Democratic rival Terry McAuliffe, largely, it seems, because Virginians greatly objected to the horrible doctrine of critical race theory being rammed down the throats of their children.

Let’s be clear, there is also a great deal of voter disillusionment with the somnambulant President Biden, who is now seen as being weak, past it, devious, a semi-conscious stooge of the far left, etc. But the Virginia result was of a much greater magnitude than simply your usual pre-midterm disaffection. Youngkin hammered away at education and the critical race theory stuff in particular, and as a consequence got overwhelming support from, especially, white women who have children. Of course his opponent tried to portray this campaigning as ‘racist’ (as well as trying to tie Youngkin to the coat-tails of Donald Trump), and since the result came through lefties both here and in the US have claimed that Youngkin was indulging in ‘dog-whistle politics’ and appealing to racism. That is likely to become a familiar recourse: object to anything to do with identity politics and the left will insist that it is mere racism.

Virginia convinced me, perhaps over-optimistically, that the culture war could eclipse the economy and be the major battle-ground both in the US and here, come the next election. All it needs is for an enterprising political party (yes, such as the one to which I belong, the SDP) to choose its issue carefully. Schooling is the answer: whether it be the Stonewall-sponsored rot on trans-genderism or teachers telling white kids how privileged they are, Virginia has shown the way forward.

Can Boris weather this new storm?

The row over MPs’ outside interests has landed Boris Johnson in one of the most uncomfortable positions a prime minister can be in: he has to choose between being on the wrong side of public opinion and his own backbenchers. What makes matters worse is that his own misjudgment got him into this position. Even a ministerial loyalist admits that: ‘It’s up there with the biggest mistake.’

The government’s attempt to block the standards committee’s guilty verdict against Owen Paterson and change the rules surrounding MPs’ conduct was so brazen that it has, inevitably, created a row about second jobs for MPs. If Paterson had, as the committee recommended, been suspended for 30 days, the government could have said that the system for regulating outside interests had worked and that would have been the end of the matter. Instead, the attempt to stop the verdict has led to questions about whether it is appropriate for MPs to be earning more than their parliamentary salary from their outside interests even when they aren’t lobbying ministers.

One long-serving MP compares the situation with the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal when second-home arrangements that had previously been reported without arousing any great interest suddenly became the subject of controversy and intense voter anger. ‘Transparency is not a defence when the mood turns,’ he warns — and it does seem to be turning.

You might think that No. 10 would be inclined to get ahead of this shift in public opinion and announce strict curbs on outside interests, but this would cause more problems. Firstly, there are reasons to think that these curbs could do more harm than good. If it becomes much harder for MPs to have outside interests, then more and more former ministers will leave parliament as soon as they leave office, taking their knowledge and experience with them. The second problem is that a significant chunk of the Tory parliamentary party would be infuriated if No. 10 introduced controls on second jobs. About a quarter of Tory MPs have outside interests. Their anger would be particularly strong given that this crisis has been sparked by Downing Street’s actions.

One of the big differences between the situation Johnson faces and David Cameron’s handling of the MPs’ expenses scandal is that Cameron was no more responsible for the scandal than any other MP. Even so, the moves he made to limit the fallout created bitterness in the Conservative parliamentary party. Many resented the summary justice that was meted out, in particular the requirement for anyone who wished to stand again as a Tory candidate to repay certain expenses that had previously been approved. However politically necessary this move was, there is little doubt it damaged Cameron’s relations with his own MPs.

What further complicates the situation for Johnson is that there are different priorities on his own backbenches. Many of the 2019 intake, particularly those sitting in former Labour seats, are not inclined to expend political capital defending the current system. They worry that arguing that MPs need to be able to make more than their £82,000 salary makes the Tories sound out of touch. (Many of the new MPs are earning more than they were before they entered the Commons.) Tory MPs with substantial outside interests are, unsurprisingly, not keen on changes to the current arrangements. One long-serving Tory MP observes: ‘We’ve now got two parliamentary parties. One which thinks that £82,000 is the basic salary and one that thinks it is all the money in the world.’ More traditional Tory MPs argue that if MPs are not allowed to do any other work, this will narrow down the number of people who want to be an MP, which will make parliament the preserve of those who are interested only in being professional politicians.

One compromise that the government hasn’t ruled out is a ban on consultancy jobs. The idea is that MPs could carry on being doctors or nurses or lawyers but they wouldn’t be allowed to be paid for providing general political advice to companies. But how would such provisions be drafted? Even those who have previously been advocates of this reform admit it would be difficult to carry out. If you allow people to be barristers, why not solicitors? Some leading law firms also do advisory work, so where would the line be drawn?

If a consultancy ban is unworkable, another option would be to limit the number of hours a week that an MP can spend on any outside interest. This, however, raises other questions. Theresa May recently earned more than £80,000 for a speech to JP Morgan Chase which took three hours of her time. Would it be reasonable to ban another MP from earning far less money for working longer hours on another job?

Another idea doing the rounds is a salary cap on outside earnings. This would dictate that no MP could earn more from outside interests than their parliamentary salary. The objection to this would simply be that it would lead to more former cabinet ministers quitting the Commons once they have left government. Those hit by this would also point out that in the 12 months before he became prime minister, Johnson earned much more from outside interests than he did from his work as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. For Labour, this could be fertile territory.

Neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats can fully capitalise on the government’s predicament because of the positions of their own leaders. Sir Keir Starmer held discussions with the law firm Mishcon de Reya in 2017 about advising its academy before rejecting the idea. Sir Ed Davey currently does work for two firms: Herbert Smith Freehills and Next Energy Capital. Yet it is the prime minister who has most to lose if the outside interests row continues to gather pace.

The backdrop to the next few years already looked difficult for the government. The Bank of England forecasts that real wages will decline for the next two years and the Covid backlogs in health and the criminal justice system will get worse before they get better. Johnson will have to weather this period with a parliamentary party that is increasingly fractious.

China has begun its campaign to take Taiwan

Normally, if the response to a speech of mine was that it had been a ‘despicable and insane performance’ from a ‘failed and pitiful politician’, I’d question what went wrong. But since the comments came from Chinese communists about an address I’d made in Taiwan, it’s hard not to feel some pride. Two years ago, I’d been asked to speak at the Yushan Forum, the Taiwanese government’s annual showcase for their international links. Then, I was worried about the optics of calling out Beijing’s behaviour from Taipei so I pleaded diary difficulties. I didn’t want to be accused of complicating Australia’s relations with our prickly largest customer. But this year, after China’s suffocation of Hong Kong, belligerence towards all its neighbours and especially its weaponisation of trade against my own country, it was almost my duty to give the Red Emperor’s next target some moral support. Besides, a good use of ex-prime ministers is for saying what needs to be said without the diplomatic equivocation required of national leaders.

Of course, Covid makes everything harder than it should be. My first observations during a meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen about the importance of solidarity with Taiwan had to be mumbled through a mask. The main speech involved a Perspex shield between the speaker and the socially distanced audience. Taiwan, which was officially ignored by the World Health Organisation during the pandemic, has so far handled Covid better than just about anywhere else. There have been fewer than 1,000 deaths and no strict lockdowns. It’s a record the government is keen to maintain at least until vaccination rates get to high levels. And being in a Covid bubble for four days with nearly all meetings in the one hotel, in specially designated rooms, was a small price to pay for the chance to salute a people who are now under existential threat.

While the world has been preoccupied with Brexit, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Covid and climate change, China has engaged in the biggest military build-up in history. It already has the world’s largest navy in numerical terms, as well as the world’s largest heavily armed coastguard, plus a vast ‘maritime militia’ (including the 200 ships that recently swarmed a reef claimed by the Philippines). Just before I arrived in Taipei, Beijing flew 150 military aircraft on one day into Taiwan’s air defence zone. There are also frequent naval exercises off Taiwan’s coast, social media campaigns designed to demoralise the Taiwanese people and cyber-attacks. The campaign to take Taiwan has already begun.

As long as the US Pacific Fleet had unquestionable dominance of the seas, Taiwan was safe. Now, though, US ships would be acutely vulnerable to China’s carrier-busting missiles, and China is creating a massive amphibious assault capability to storm the island if necessary, drive US forces out of the Western Pacific and realise its oft-stated aim of becoming the world’s dominant power by 2049. For the Taiwanese, the challenge is to move military strategy away from fanciful Kuomintang-era campaigns to ‘retake the mainland’, and towards obstructing a sea and airborne invasion. This means less emphasis on ships, planes and tanks; and more on highly mobile ‘stinger’ missiles, smart mines, attack speedboats and lots of shooters to make any invader pay a colossal price. For America, the challenge is to keep its technological lead in offensive and defensive missiles and to work out how to help Taiwan should fighting start. For both, the ultimate question is: what price freedom?

Would the Taiwanese risk their lives for their country? And what risks should America now run to preserve the freedom of ‘little China’ against ‘big China’? How many people today would be ready to declare, like Churchill to his ministers in 1940, that ‘if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood’? A poll last year showed that 77 per cent of Taiwanese people were willing to fight an invasion. Even so, compulsory military service has been reduced to just four months and the defence budget is still just over 2 per cent of GDP, so Taiwan’s hardly an ‘eastern Israel’. The point I tried to make to all the Taiwanese leaders I met is that if there is a post-Afghanistan Biden doctrine, it’s ‘America helps those who help themselves’.

If America were to fight for Taiwan, allies such as Australia couldn’t stand aloof. Japan has also just declared that responding to an attack on Taiwan would be ‘self-defence’. And the Far Eastern deployment of the HMS Queen Elizabeth taskforce is a sign that Britain, too, is aware how much is at stake. The best way to ensure that the unthinkable remains unlikely and that the possible doesn’t become the probable is to let China know that any assault on Taiwan would have incalculable consequences. Taiwan is now freedom’s front line. Korea and Japan will be next if the US alliance system were to collapse in disavowal or defeat.

The weird and wonderful world of underground chess

Most people have a set list to tick off when visiting a new country. The national museum, the famous bridge, the legendary music venue. For me, no holiday is complete until I’ve checked out the local chess scene.

The habit started on a solo trip to Paris a few years ago. As a keen chess player — no master, but a competent amateur — I made sure to visit Jardin du Luxembourg, where chess enthusiasts famously congregate for games.

After enjoying some matches before dusk fell and the regulars packed up, I offhandedly asked my opponent where else was good to play. In the manner of a John le Carré character, he gave me a time, a name and an address. Intrigued, I followed his instructions and found myself in an empty bar, about to close, in the 11th arrondissement. No chess in sight, but when I said the name I’d been given, the barman shouted with delight and pulled out a board.

As we played, more people arrived. I had joined Paris’s underground chess community, and was welcomed in as ‘L’Anglais’. Our group moved on and visited two more bars, playing increasingly frenzied and drunken games of three-minute ‘blitz’ chess. We ended up at a nightclub, where punters dancing on tables made further games impossible.

When I woke the next morning, I was unsure if I’d dreamt the whole thing. But I had exchanged contacts with one of my new friends, and on my return to Paris four years later I messaged him asking for more chess recommendations. Within minutes, I was sent the name of a new spot — ‘Blitz Society’, south of the Seine.

To an amateur enthusiast like myself, it is heaven: a bar consisting purely of tables with chessboards built into them, each with pieces and clocks provided. People turn up throughout the evening, with friends or by themselves, and are paired off for games by the bar staff.

I found myself matched with a young Parisian who worked for the civil service. While our two governments were involved in a war of words over fishing rights, we took the fight to the chessboard. Throwing friendly, good-natured insults at each other about our respective nations’ stereotypes and deficiencies, we built a friendship over the board. I introduced him to some chess variants — where the rules are changed and the games are wild. He particularly liked Bughouse, played with four players across two boards. Captured pieces are passed to your teammate for them to place on their board where they wish.

Paris is not the only city to offer much to a chess-loving traveller. I’ve had many memorable experiences — at Budapest spas, in Porto bars, on the Great Wall of China, in an Iraqi desert, and even on top of a 10,000ft Swiss mountain. Chess is a universal religion. Its devotees are weird and wonderful people. Sometimes eccentric, often obsessive, always interesting, they also tend to know far more about their cities than most. Spontaneous opponents have become city guides, emergency contacts, lifelong friends.

New York must hold the crown for the king of casual street chess. Go to Union Square or Washington Square park and you’ll find Wall Street bankers and homeless ex-cons sitting across tables from each other, pieces flying. They come from completely separate walks of life but here they are equals. A chessboard is a level playing field, where social status, economic power and racial identity have no bearing on the outcome. All that matters is ability.

If you’re feeling lucky, you can always find a hustler to wager against. When cash is involved, I’d caution against taking on the shabby-looking men in the park. They have been playing for decades and know all the tricks. The sharp-suited yet less experienced guys from Wall Street are much easier to profit from.

On one of my own travels in New York, too much time in the Downtown shops and bars had left me out of dollars on my final day. A successful session at Union Square supplied me with enough to get a taxi to JFK airport.

But you don’t have to rely on an existing culture of street chess to find a game when abroad. My foldable silicone chessboard and pouch of pieces — less than £20 from the Chess and Bridge shop on Baker Street —have been trusty companions on countless overseas adventures. Armed with your own set, you’d be surprised how easy it is to find an opponent in a foreign country.

During a solitary trip to Copenhagen, I set up my board at the youth hostel where I was staying. I was given a few curious looks, but within minutes a local approached and gestured enquiringly. He sat down to play and we quickly got into the rhythm of fast-paced blitz games. Soon, a dozen backpackers were crowded round the board. Many confessed to not knowing how the pieces move, yet were fascinated nonetheless. My opponent spoke no English and I no Danish, but it didn’t matter. The exchange across the chessboard was more stimulating and compelling than any conversation I’d had during the trip.

This is the beauty of chess. It is a debate without words, a silent conversation (although ‘trash talking’ is a common and entertaining feature of street chess). You must put yourself in your opponent’s shoes, read them and understand them. You must assess their style, identify their strengths, learn their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, discern their strategy, predict their moves. These techniques aren’t just relevant to chess — they are life skills too. The ability to look ahead and see round corners is just as valuable in the worlds of business and politics as it is on a chessboard.

Chess is not always risk-free. Most pieces have lead discs in their bases to give them weight and stop them from tipping over. I learned to my cost on a trip to Beirut that having 32 lead-weighted chess pieces in your bag carries significant danger when going through airport security. With the baggage scanner alarm going ballistic and airport security staff shouting about what were either concealed bullets or some kind of bomb in my bag, I found myself confronted by heavily armed security forces.

The situation only worsened when they opened up my bag to find my digital chess clock, which had been left on, ticking, flashing and counting down towards zero like a nuclear device in a spy movie. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so serious. Fortunately, one security guard recognised the clock for what it was and I escaped intact. I can only assume he must have been a chess player himself. I should have asked if he fancied a game.

Why the UK can’t rely on renewables…yet

Like a football tournament with an official beer, COP26 had an official energy provider: the Griffin wind farm in Perthshire, operated by SSE. Trouble is that for much of the conference it was not paid to generate electricity. Instead, it received £500,000 in ‘constraint payments’, which are given to owners of wind farms when they are generating too much electricity for the grid to absorb. The payments expose a huge hole in Britain’s renewables-heavy energy policy: we have little means of storing energy when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining so that we can use it on dull, windless days.

In eight years, Boris Johnson has gone from telling us that wind turbines ‘couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’ to boasting that Britain is going to become ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’. He is wrong on both counts. Give a wind turbine a strong sou’wester and it could pull the roof off the entire Ambrosia factory. As for the Saudi comment, we’ve got a long way to go: as things stand Britain ranks only sixth in the world for installed wind power capacity, behind China, the US, Germany, India and Spain.

The comparison is also inapt because Saudi Arabia doesn’t routinely pour its oil down the drain for want of tanks to store it or tankers to take it away. That is what we are doing with wind energy. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, 3.7 TWh of wind energy in 2020 — enough to power every home in Wales for the whole year — was wasted because the national grid could not accept it. Wind farm owners were paid a total of £274 million in ‘constraint payments’ to turn off their turbines — which was passed on to consumers’ bills.

The problem is exacerbated because over-generous constraint payments have given wind-farm operators a perverse incentive to build in places where there is little demand for electricity: they get paid more when they are not generating electricity than when they are.

If this is what happens when wind is generating 24 per cent of our electricity, as it did last year, imagine the outcome when we try to meet the PM’s ambition of having all our electricity generated by low-carbon sources by 2035 — when we will no longer have any gas-fired power stations as back-up.

It ought to be obvious that wind and solar power cannot form the backbone of the nation’s electricity supply without vast quantities of storage. Yet our national enthusiasm for wind and solar power has run ahead of solving the storage problem. In spite of a boom in battery installations over the past couple of years, most of Britain’s energy storage capacity is in the form of hydro-electric pumped systems built between the 1950s and 1980s in order to improve the efficiency of nuclear power stations (there is another planned for Loch Lochy in the Great Glen but it will take years to build). This is a disarmingly simple way of storing energy: when electricity is plentiful and cheap, during the night, you pump water uphill to a reservoir. When demand is greater during the day, you release it to run downhill, through turbines.

But Britain’s four pumped storage power stations were designed to iron out diurnal cycles in supply and demand, not to supply electricity for days on end when renewables are not delivering the goods. The battery boom has attracted investors after green assets — two investment trusts which specialise in batteries, Gresham House Energy Storage and Gore Street Energy Storage, are both trading at premiums of 15 per cent to their underlying assets — but it has hardly helped Britain to cope with the regular droughts in wind and solar power. According to National Grid ESO — the demerged bit of National Grid which looks after the actual grid — Britain currently has 25.4 GWh of energy storage. Given that we consumed 346,000 GWh of electricity in 2019, this amounts to just 38 minutes’ worth of supply. Imagine that the nation’s electricity was supplied entirely by wind and solar. If the Cup Final was held on a dull and windless day, we wouldn’t even get to half-time before the TV flickered and died.

Big batteries are not without risk, either. Australia has seen vast battery installations in recent years, one of which, the Victoria Big Battery, burst into flames in July, taking 30 fire engines four days to put it out. While big batteries were credited with helping south Australia get by for 29 days in October on wind and solar power alone, that was an especially windy and sunny month. The state’s massive 129 MWh Hornsdale battery will store just 24 minutes’ worth of energy when the adjoining wind farm is working at full pelt.

When you store energy, you have to pay twice: once to generate it and again to store it. In many cases, the latter costs more than the former. A study last December by the US Department of Energy put the lifetime cost of energy from a 100 MW pumped storage system at around $100 (£75) per MWh and that from a lithium ion battery installation at $300 (£225) per MWh. Prior to this autumn’s spike, the wholesale price of electricity was hovering around £60 per MWh.

We are told that wind and solar power are cheap because the price of turbines and panels has crashed. But you can’t have an electricity grid dominated by wind and solar without supplementing it with massive amounts of storage. The cheapest way of storing energy according to the US Department of Energy, by the way, is by using surplus power to fill an underground chamber with compressed air, then releasing it to drive turbines. There has been such a plant operating in the US since 1991 — although it is not an easy solution because it needs a very particular kind of geology.

Storage technology will no doubt improve, but whether it will do so at the rate and to the extent required to allow the government to close down gas plants by 2035 is an entirely different matter. Saudi Arabians have been richly rewarded by living in a country awash with oil. Filling your tank in Riyadh costs the equivalent of 44p a litre for petrol and 10p for diesel. Keeping yourself warm in the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’ is not, I’m afraid, going to be so cheap.

The selfie is dead – but self-obsession is universal

In 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary named ‘selfie’ as the word of the year. Its use had increased by 17,000 per cent in just 12 months, the OED revealed. Before long a cottage industry of feminist scholars sprang up, dedicated to producing gruesome waffle on the subject.

A paper by Emma Renold of Cardiff University and Jessica Ringrose of University College London, for example, was entitled ‘Selfies, relfies and phallic tagging: post-human participations [sic] in teen digital sexuality assemblages’. Not to be outdone, Katie Warfield of Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Canada, wrote ‘MirrorCamera-Room: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie’. Dr Terri Senft of New York University founded an international Selfie Researchers Network to study ‘the politics and aesthetics of selfie culture’. It was all very exciting. ‘As an academic known for publishing on selfie culture,’ wrote Senft, ‘I often find myself dialoguing with reporters charged with answering for their readers once and for all whether taking and circulating photos of oneself constitutes an empowering act, or a disempowering one’.

When feminist academics start writing such gobbledegook about a social trend, it’s never long before the real world moves on. In 2018 Wired magazine declared that ‘the selfie as we know it is dead’ — adding that ‘Data from Google Trends has also shown a steady decline in the keyword since it was added to the dictionary in 2013.’

A decade ago, teenagers were addicted to photographing themselves. Today’s Generation Z adolescents can’t be bothered with Instagram, which they regard as an antiquated toy for millennials. And, as far as I can see, the Selfie Researchers Network hasn’t updated its website for seven years.

Today teenagers make TikTok videos in which they perform 30-second comedy sketches and dance routines, or pose as models. The Chinese app has one billion users worldwide, including 70 per cent of all American teenagers. What’s disconcerting is how artfully professional these young people are. This is partly thanks to the cunning format. But it’s also because, in western society generally, the urge to mimic celebrities has been growing stronger for decades.

In her 1998 book The Overspent American, Juliet Schor argued that people in suburban neighbourhoods had stopped trying to keep up with the Joneses next door, whom they probably didn’t even know, and instead based their aspirations on a ‘reference group’ of celebrities and other public figures. She was worried that maxing out credit cards on a fake lifestyle would lead to financial and psychological despair, and it often did.

But then, with disorientating speed, digital technology lowered the cost of imitating the rich and famous. The combination of mobile-phone cameras and social media created the selfie: not just a photograph of yourself but also a glimpse of your inner narcissist.

We meet famous people all the time now. There are more of them. Gone are the days when you could dine out on having shaken hands with Max Bygraves at your daughter’s school fête. (My grandmother had that honour and didn’t let us forget it.) We may not think of ourselves as celebrities, but we don’t freeze in front of a television camera, as people did as recently as the 1970s when, say, ambushed for a vox pop by a cub reporter from Anglia Television. ‘What do you make of these punk rockers, then?’ Cue clearing of throat, patting down of hair and terror in the eyes.

Seen in this light, the selfie craze can be interpreted as a stage on the journey towards universal self-obsession. It wouldn’t have surprised the late American historian Christopher Lasch. His book The Culture of Narcissism, published in 1979, described a society in which both political utopianism and ‘hierarchies of work and power’ had wilted. This created feelings of isolation and a craving for validation. Everywhere he looked he saw narcissists who ‘cannot live without an admiring audience’.

Lasch died in 1994 — about seven years before social media made it difficult for anyone to live without an audience, whether they wanted one or not. And it wasn’t necessarily an admiring audience.

If people didn’t ‘like’ your Instagram selfies, did that mean they didn’t like you? Psychologists reported a sharp increase in users traumatised by their use of the app. Some plastic surgeons made a fortune out of the distorting lens of phone cameras, which made noses seem bigger. Millennials worked out that while selfies were a neat way of preserving happy memories, they were also a cruel record of the ageing process. They got sick of scrolling down their timelines and seeing their waistlines shrink and wrinkles disappear. And so the selfie craze petered out.

How will today’s one billion juvenile luvvies cope when they are no longer ‘TikTok famous’, as they put it? Perhaps they’ll be insufferable when they finally enter the workplace. Then again — and this is a scary thought — perhaps they’ll need their comic timing, meticulous grooming and manufactured charisma in order to survive.

We’re already moving in that direction. The office workers of 50 years ago would have been bewildered by the way 21st-century employees treat the most routine meetings as talent contests. They have no choice: the hierarchical safety net that was already full of holes when Lasch wrote his book has been whisked away. Middle-aged people, unintentionally aping their all-singing, all-dancing children, are frantically trying to create a little charismatic buzz in the room — not out of vanity, necessarily, but because they’ll lose their jobs if they’re old and boring. Their painted-on smiles betray a deep anxiety. And if you doubt that, just look at their selfies.

Could Cicero help MPs who can’t govern?

MPs are not exactly attracting plaudits for their recent attempts at governing. Perhaps Cicero’s three-book work On Duties (De Officiis) might be of assistance. It was written in 44 BC, a few months after the tyrant Julius Caesar was assassinated. Seeing life as a complex of obligations to others and oneself, Cicero picks apart the challenges this raises. Book III is of particular interest, where he tackles the problem of how to resolve a situation in which there is a clash between what is advantageous and what is right. He is not looking for the perfect solution, he says — no one is perfect — but for a working solution that ‘comes within the range of our comprehension’ and is ‘relevant to all mankind’. His example is Caesar’s assassination. Surely, he says, nothing could be worse than murder, especially of a friend? But Caesar was a tyrant, and Romans saw it as a noble deed. So has advantage trumped right? No: advantage has derived from right.

Cicero’s argument is that doing what is right will always be advantageous, but no advantage can arise if that advantage is not right too. Indeed, ‘the only yardstick of advantage is moral right’. Here nature — the way things must be — comes in. If it is natural (and it is) that every human helps every other human simply because they are human, then all have identical interests, and from that it follows that we are subject to the same natural law. So a man who thinks it natural to harm someone else for his own benefit is simply taking away from man all that makes him man, and violating the laws of nature. To do so is to degrade one’s own humanity. But the man who obeys the laws of nature cannot wrong his fellow man.

Cicero enunciates the overall principle underlying this line of thought as follows: ‘This one thing should be everyone’s objective, to identify the interest of each with the interest of all.’ Not a bad way for government and MPs on all sides to think about their responsibilities. Voltaire thought no one would write a wiser, truer or more useful book.

How to get drunk on tiramisu

You can get drunk on tiramisu. I have done it. It takes two portions at least. You drink (I mean eat) the Marsala wine and the rum — and then must be escorted, tenderly, to the bus stop. I don’t usually drink alcohol. If I did, I would smash up restaurants. But I do eat tiramisu. You have to eat a lot of tiramisu to be hospitalised. That is my reasoning.

Tiramisu means ‘lift me up’. Like Caesar salad and the world, it has a detailed creation myth with its own pretenders, factions, expert witnesses and conspiracy theories. There is a website, the Tiramisu Academy, devoted to the mystery of its origin. (‘Since 2011 we have been transmitting the culture of tiramisu.’) The academy suggests tiramisu was invented to inspire men meeting prostitutes in 19th-century Treviso: an early Viagra for clients who took a dose when leaving the brothel, so they could then copulate with their wives. This sounds plausible — an Italian equivalent of ‘my wife needs me to eat the last Quality Street toffee penny for sex’. The academy’s expert witness, the writer Giovanni Comisso, who remembered his grandmother’s personalised tiramisu, died in 1969.

The alternative narrative is that it was invented in Ado Campeol’s restaurant Alle Beccherie in Treviso in 1969 — the year Comisso died — by Campeol, his wife Alba and the chef Roberto Linguanotto, who is the Perkin Warbeck figure in this drama. In this telling it was either a lucky mistake — Linguanotto dropped mascarpone cheese into the mixture for vanilla ice cream in error — or a palliative for aching nipples and an aching heart.

Sugar, cheese and biscuits were Alba’s chosen foods to console her for the exhaustion she felt while breastfeeding her son Carlo; with Linguanotto she combined them. (The hard alcohol came later.)Campeol died last month with his title ‘the father of tiramisu’ intact. This feels depressingly patriarchal.

Some things are worth a battle. The alchemy in tiramisu is just that. There are three distinct flavours (coffee, sugar, hard alcohol) and three textures (cream, crumble, wet). When done properly, it is the greatest pudding there is. You can’t get high on a profiterole, though I have tried, and you can only get low on treacle sponge. When done badly, it is repulsive: ladyfingers in cheap booze; something found at the bottom of a sink. It must be firm, not soggy. The cheese must be light, not heavy. The best I had was in Venice, at Muro Frari. The worst was in Camden Town in a restaurant that I hope has burnt down.

There are variations, but I am a purist (though we must have hard alcohol). Can I say I really hate panettone? And that Tia Maria does not belong anywhere outside of a slur? And that vodka should only ever be drunk neat, and not inside food? You may say it’s just a trifle. Bah!

How to be a heretic

Two weeks ago, I resigned my post as philosophy professor at Sussex University. For three years, I’ve faced bullying and harassment for my views on sex and gender. More recently, this intensified into a full-blown campaign. Posters and graffiti went up denouncing me. Masked students held protests, set off flares and gave interviews saying they felt unsafe with me around. The problems all started when I began making such controversial statements as: ‘there are only two sexes’ and ‘it’s wrong to put male rapists in women’s prisons’. I even went as far as worrying out loud about the consequences of children being given body-altering drugs based on potentially temporary inner feelings. It has been all too much for certain colleagues. My critics have produced an apparently unstoppable narrative, according to which I’m a bigot and a terrible danger to trans students. What they lack in evidence, they make up for in conviction. Eventually any hopes I could lead a relatively normal life on campus were definitively extinguished. My feelings are mixed. What exactly I’ve lost has yet to sink in, but there’s also some exhilaration and a new sense of freedom. Finally, I can admit to the really heretical aspects of my character. For instance: I’ve never read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

For years now, I’ve criticised academic feminism for its failures: the internal contradictions, the unacknowledged class interests, the rampant narcissism of the few, the careerist capitulation of the many. In particular, I’ve criticised some academics for their enthusiasm about gender identity theory: roughly, the theory that, in every conceivable context, inner feelings of a misaligned ‘inner’ gender identity are more important than material facts about ‘outer’ biological sex. With this, a feminism focused on women and girls in the original sense was instantly defined out of existence. In return, academic feminists have attacked me, hard: I’m unkind, I’m intellectually second-rate, I can’t have read ‘the literature’. Don’t I know that sex is a spectrum and the notion of a sex binary a colonial plot? And so on. It’s been a turf war, not just a terf war. Outside the academy, most people look on with blank incomprehension. Sometimes education really can make you more stupid.

Since my resignation, I’ve been supported by many outside the university. One wonderful friend, on hearing of the posters on campus proclaiming my ‘transphobia’, rushed there with a scraper to take them down herself. I’ve received supportive emails, letters, flowers, booze, food, music, cosmetics and an expletive-decorated cake. It has been both the worst and best of times.

In between ploughing our way through delicious gifts of food, my wife and I have been watching the documentary Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution, and have reached the episode about the Iraq war. I’m reminded that in 2003, 54 per cent of British respondents thought going to war was justified; but when asked again in 2015, only 37 per cent remembered it that way. This offers a possible answer to a question which frequently troubles me: how, in future years, are people going to get out of the identity-based corner into which many have painted themselves? How will they deal with their recollected support for the placing of male rapists in women’s prisons, or the performing of double mastectomies on teenage girls, or the crowding out of female athletes from sporting competitions, or the pressuring of lesbians into sexual relations with males who say they are women? If it means we can put this nonsense behind us, perhaps we should bring on the convenient collective forgetting.

I am on the left — or at least, a version of the left that doesn’t involve trying to get employees sacked by bosses, which may or may not be the left as we now know it. One frequent preoccupation of fellow left-wingers is the potential for guilt by association with those on the right. When feminists like Julie Bindel and I share a platform with a Tory, or write something for The Spectator, isn’t that just grist to the mill of our enemies? And, over time, won’t this heinous practice increase the likelihood of our own politics becoming less feminist? My usual response is to point out that an ideology with ambitions to erase fundamental categories like ‘woman’ and ‘man’ will annoy nearly everyone, right-wingers included (usually adding that if the Guardian ever want me, they know where to find me). But these days I feel more bullish. As far as I can see, rather than feminists like Julie Bindel becoming more right-wing by appearing in The Spectator, Spectator readers are becoming more feminist by reading articles by Julie Bindel. And that’s fine by me.

The art of seizing the moment in photographic portraiture

A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits, teeth. Suck it in, push ’em out, show your pearly whites. Leaving aside David LaChapelle’s portrait of Pamela Anderson, there’s a shortage of Ts in Phillip Prodger’s Face Time. This looks likea coffee-table book but doesn’t bark like a coffee-table book. On first flick through, I found the pictures desultory, even depressing. I was expecting more of a Condé Nast vibe. Glossy and glossier. On second approach, taking text and pictures together, it became a more interesting beast.

Prodger is a former head of photography at the National Portrait Gallery and the founding Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He has thought deeply about photography and portraiture in all its masks and guises. This isn’t the usual greatest hits album, a book to idle through one afternoon between Christmas and New Year. There are no photographs by His Royal Airbrushness Mario Testino. Where the big names do appear, it is often in uncharacteristic costume. Cecil Beaton is represented not by Audrey Hepburn, but by a charlady. In a series of three photographs, ‘From Charwoman to Dowager’, taken in the 1930s, Beaton reveals the retoucher’s art. A dumpy subject is transformed into a slender duchess. The middle photo is annotated with Beaton’s commands from the dark room: ‘lighten hair’, ‘make face symmetric & young’ and so on.

Prodger points to a paradox: most cameras are set to take a photograph in 1/60th of a second. ‘Considering there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and 27,000 days in the average lifespan, this means a single photograph might capture just 1/140 billionth of a person’s time on Earth.’ A photographer’s aim is ‘to condense all that is worth knowing about a person — aspirations and fears, talents and shortcomings, humour and affect — into one such microscopic slice of their existence’. Anyone who has ever had to choose a photograph for a dating website, a corporate headshot or a byline pic will know the difficulty.

Prodger’s selection is surprising and playful and the essays which begin each section are eye-opening. He gives us Hiroshi Sugimoto’s portrait of the Queen (really her waxwork at Madame Tussauds) and a picture from Anderson & Low’s ‘Manga Dreams’ sequence in which subjects are styled like Japanese manga warriors, princesses and villains. We see Mark Zuckerberg’s VR avatar and pretty (and pretty eerie) synthetic faces created by AI.

The Iranian artist Newsha Tavakolian responds to the regime’s prohibition of female singers performing alone or on stage with a series of sitters singing only for the camera. Mahsa Vahdat’s eyes are closed; all the life is in her lips. The photographer Taryn Simon creates a Frankenstein’s monster from bits of despots and dictators: the lower eyelid bags of the Lebanese cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the legs of Bashar al-Assad.

More cheerfully, Dolly Parton is here represented by her attempt at the ‘Meme Challenge’, in which celebrities and online mortals picked selfies that best represented their LinkedIn (professional), Facebook (friendly), Tinder (flirty) and Instagram (phoney) selves. I liked John Baldessari’s photograph ‘Numbered Legs’, a frieze-like portrait of editors on the catwalk front row, their faces blanked out but their immaculate shins and shoes on show.

The Tatler photographer had one other piece of advice. For a sunny smile, don’t say ‘cheese’, say ‘shit’. Say it quietly, but it works.

Bernardine Evaristo sets a rousing example of ‘never giving up’

Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto — part instructional guide for artists, part call to arms for equality, part literary memoir —shimmers with unfailing self-belief and a strong vein of humility. When Evaristo won the Booker Prize in 2019 for her magnificent seventh novel Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman to do so, it was the pinnacle of a career devoted not just to honing her craft but to helping others traditionally excluded from the literary world, through teaching, mentoring and activism.

There is a great deal of style to Evaristo’s life story; her childhood has strong storybook notes. Her home was a huge, rundown house in south London with 12 rooms, eight children and a bannister valiant enough to bear them. In their front room stood two broken antique pianos. The young Bernardine dreamed of formica and linoleum. Her white, Catholic, teacher mother was a terrific home-maker, insisting on healthy eating and tons of cuddles. Her children competed well into their teenage years to massage her tired legs at night. Her black, Nigerian, welder father, Julius, a strict disciplinarian, had an approach to home improvements which wasn’t suited to the human lifespan — a bath languishing uninstalled against the bathroom wall for several decades. (Beat that.)

It was a political household, and proud to be so, her father working as a Labour councillor and shop steward, her mother the union rep at the school where she taught. Yet Julius’s extreme strictness, his frequent recourse to the wooden spoon and the belt and the hour-long lectures that preceded these punishments meant his children often lived in fear. Additionally, Evaristo’s mother’s family’s vehement opposition to her marriage to a Nigerian wounded the children’s sense of identity. ‘We grew up knowing that some of the people who should have been closest to us disapproved of us to the extent they had nothing to do with us.’ In Manifesto, painful things are stated quietly, often briefly, and then left. Respecting your own privacy is in keeping with Evaristo’s moral code.

From an adolescence enriched by participation in youth theatre, enhanced by rainbows of self-made stripey garments, the young Evaristo came into her own. She progressed to drama school and a career in theatre, going on to found Britain’s first black women’s theatre company. It was writing poetry, however, drawing on new knowledge and insights into her childhood and African heritage, often while sipping whisky and listening to Edith Piaf, that precipitated a cultural awakening.

From this period there emerged the conviction that she must nurture and feed her creativity, above all, living frugally, moving house frequently, steering clear of relationships that might lead to too much domesticity, doing everything to avoid relegating her art to ‘secondary status’. Evaristo deliberately set out to improve her confidence, with personal development courses, self-discipline and affirmations, setting in place the internal infrastructure required for her to thrive. It was a masterpiece of self-care. Even today she teaches her students at Brunel University, where she is professor of creative writing, to stave off failures and disappointments, even as they occur, so they cannot land.

Manifesto is punctuated by episodes of racism, some shrugged off, some stinging bitterly. Bricks were thrown through the windows of Evaristo’s childhood home, her father chasing the culprits, making their parents pay for the damage caused. When she was 15, a classmate taking sociology O-level conducted a survey. Would you want to live next door to ‘a coloured family?’ Seventy-five per cent of her class answered no. These were her friends. During an audition for the Central School of Speech and Drama a staff member examined Evaristo’s mouth and teeth. The cost of trying to move forward with such ugly opposition is communicated powerfully. Yet it somehow feels like a disservice to dwell on what she has endured rather than what she has achieved.

She writes memorable characters who leap off the page, follow you upstairs and flag you down. I’ll never forget Barrington, the charismatic, maddening hero of her sixth novel Mr Loverman, despairing as one of his wife’s friends from church discusses the size of a friend’s daughter’s uterine fibroids, with great relish, over ‘lumpy tendons’ of goat. Evaristo writes so well about all the different ways of being a family. The cruel, coercive, lesbian relationship in Girl, Woman, Other terrifies me to this day. Her first novel, Lara, treats seven generations of her personal history in verse, with verve and depth. She gives us a mother tortured by the thought of her teenagers, out on the town, who ‘worries herself to sainthood most nights, fearing the briars/of our city’s urban jungle, missing persons/Bill Sikes’. She captures the invincible-seeming father’s anguish following his mother’s death: ‘I am a strong man but pain is a warrior too./ The pit I build for grief this time will be infinite.’

Manifesto’s subtitle is ‘On Never Giving Up’. A better advert for this maxim you could not find.

The Battle for Britain | 13 November 2021

Bridge | 13 November 2021

It can’t have been a surprise to anyone who knows him that when Andrew Black — Bertie to his friends — decided to get serious about bridge, he was thinking big. He doesn’t do things by halves. His passion for sports betting led him to co-found the world’s first and largest bet exchange, Betfair, in 2000. His love of horse-racing spurred him on to be a successful owner and breeder; in 2009 he joined forces with the former England footballer Michael Owen to become co-owner of the renowned racing complex Manor House Stables in Cheshire. And then there’s bridge. Over the past few years Bertie and his squad — Team Black — have had an ever-greater impact on the international stage. Last weekend, they capped an outstanding year by winning the English Premier League. Here he is in action, racing to the finishing line at a recent online tournament against none other than the champion thoroughbred Andrew Robson.

North, Andrew Robson, led the ◆8. Black (West) discarded a heart and won with the ◆Q. Next came a club to the ♣Q and South’s ♣K. South now played the ◆K. Black ducked. South switched to the ♥2; Robson played the ♥9 and dummy’s ♥Q won. Next came five rounds of clubs. Black now held: ♠9 ♥K8 ◆A4 opposite ♠AJ87 ♥5. Robson had come down to ♠KQ6 ♥A7. When Black cashed the ◆A, Robson was squeezed. He discarded the ♠6; Black played a spade to the ♠A and threw him in with a second spade, forcing him to lead a heart to his ♥K for a ninth trick.

A tale of bitter brotherly rivalry

For early humans there was no distinction between spirit and matter. There was no idea of self; no barrier between consciousness and the world. Eventually, evolving self-consciousness and thought put a barrier between the two. Object was irrecoverably divorced from subject. Or so I’ve read somewhere. Something like that anyway.

Very recently yet another barrier has been erected between human consciousness and the world in the form of the smart phone touch screen, putting us at not one but two removes from reality. No wonder everyone’s lost the plot. On Sunday, at the very forefront of the evolution of human consciousness, I took human evolution a step further by watching West Ham play Liverpool on my phone screen while sitting in a room in Provence. My phone screen was connected to another phone screen held shakily by my grandson and pointed at a television screen in his tiny bedroom in Basingstoke. So in this way I was able to watch the match at three removes from reality, and I was happy to do so because I don’t have a Sky Sports subscription and Radio 5 Live soccer commentaries are blocked to French listeners.

My grandson Oscar shares a bedroom with his younger brother, Klynton. Klynton supports Liverpool, Oscar the Hammers. As a caring grandad I did my utmost to dissuade Oscar from choosing West Ham United and a life of misery tempered by farce. But choose them he did. In choosing to support the consistently successful Liverpool, however, Klynton’s life will be less stressful and longer and I congratulate him for it.

The brothers share a tiny bedroom. They are either watching screens in this bedroom or they are at school. Nothing else. It’s a shame. For the past two weeks I’ve been trying, from France, to arrange a weekly football training session at a local soccer centre for them, but the project is being met with little enthusiasm from the individual most crucially involved in my plan — their father. In the interim I send them football shirts to wear while they are looking at their screens in their bedroom.

For Sunday’s match Klynton was wearing his pinkish-mauve Liverpool training shirt and Oscar something described by the West Ham United shop as a Junior Hammers’ ‘Gamers’ shirt, a concept which suits Oscar perfectly at this stalled stage of the negotiations between me and his father to get them both outside in the open air and kicking a real football. Aged 11 and ten, their respective affiliations have attained the proper level of fanaticism only in the past year. For this West Ham vs Liverpool match the brotherly rivalry was at a new and optimum level of intensity.

At the risk of boring all you rugger buggers half to death, West Ham scored first from an early corner. I saw the ball loop over, then a part of the bedroom ceiling, then I heard childlike shouting. Then I saw the referee surrounded by angry Liverpool players, then I was looking at the interior of a jar of sweets and heard that the referee’s final decision had been passed to the video referee. The camera went from the sweet jar to the match referee studying a screen on the touch line showing the slow-motion replay. Now I was watching footballers at four removes.

The goal stood. We didn’t crow, Oscar and I. We respected Klynton’s misplaced loyalty. Klynton was in any case relaxed. Liverpool would in all likelihood come back and annihilate the home side, he thought. One: Liverpool were unbeaten in an incredible 25 matches. And two (to paraphrase Belloc): ‘Whatever happens they have got/ Mohamed Salah, and we have not.’ Half an hour later said Mohamed blatantly dived at the edge of the box, pretending to have been shoved, collapsing like a pricked bubble, which he always does so well, and Liverpool scored directly from the free kick. I was shown a close-up of Klynton’s joyful face. I saw it dissolve tragically to tears when Oscar pointed out, with more vitriol than was necessary to make his point, that Salah had cheated — again.

In the second half West Ham scored two more in eight minutes. When the first went in I was being shown a pattern in the carpet, but by a lucky coincidence the camera was pointed at the screen when Zouma leapt like a salmon to put the Hammers faithful on Cloud Nine for a week. Instead of the replay, I was shown Klynton’s face again. He was crying again, then his face was obscured by his Liverpool shirt as he tore it off. Then I was shown his thin, white, abject little body leaving the bedroom again, and the door slamming behind him, followed by a close- up of Oscar’s eyebrows going up and down like a pantomime villain’s.

Spectator competition winners: tourist misinformation

In Competition No. 3224, you were invited to submit snippets of misleading advice either for tourists visiting Britain or for British tourists travelling abroad.

You normally embrace this challenge with mischievous relish but this time around the mood felt somewhat muted, perhaps not surprising under the circumstances. There were plenty of zingers all the same, and as usual those with a ring of plausibility worked best.

Several of you submitted permutations on this one, from Janine Beacham: ‘It’s traditional to picnic on the lawns at Oxford University, so pack a basket. The grass is maintained specially to encourage visitors’; and on David Shields’s ‘When travelling on the Underground, it is considered polite to make prolonged eye contact with each of your fellow passengers in turn.’ There were also many variations on Mark Ambrose’s ‘Foreigners don’t have to queue. Just wave your passport above your head and proceed to the front of the queue, but remember to smile.’

The following earn £6 per snippet.

Show your EU passport to get your first drink on the house at any Wetherspoon’s.    The British are notoriously fond of their canine companions. Opening a conversation about ‘dogging’ is a sure ice-breaker. Basil Ransome-Davies

Britain is proud of its literary heritage; there is a bookmaker on the street corner of even the poorest neighbourhood from which visitors can order bespoke editions of Shakespeare or Dickens. Adrian Fry

What better way to round off your visit than with a ticket to the Last Night of the Proms? Don’t forget to take the knee during ‘Rule, Britannia’.     An excellent place to strike up acquaintance is the Reading Room of the London Library. Take a seat and begin reading out amusing snippets from the popular press: very soon you will find yourself the focus of attention. David Shields

While touring the British countryside in winter look out for pigs in blankets. D.A. Prince

The people of Edinburgh love to be complimented on living in one of the finest English cities.     If you run out of money and credit, look for the sign ‘Free Cash Machine’. Frank Upton

When visiting Bayreuth, remember that Wagner is the Teutonic Gilbert and Sullivan. Chuckling, giggling, and occasionally roaring with laughter through the Ring cycle will demonstrate impressive cultural assimilation.    Waiters in Paris love to receive feedback on their performance. Particularly in English, which is a language many of them clearly need to practise. Nick Syrett

Ask to see the fabulous jumpers at Beachy Head.    Visit the Stadium of Light in Sunderland and ask to see ‘the Toon’. Bill Greenwell

London black taxi drivers are proud to be upholding the legacy of the Victorian hansom cab. So you’ll get a delighted reception if you hail a taxi with the traditional call of ‘Hullo, hansom!’ W.J. Webster

Ann Summers sells a nice range of masks; these can be found in the ‘Thong’ section. John O’Byrne

While in London, why not take a day trip to the famous University of Oxbridge, which has two identical campuses, easily reached by taking the train either from Oxford Circus or Cambridge Heath? Brian Murdoch

A good ice-breaker at East Anglian gatherings is ‘Norfolk Snap’, in which players point out similarities between apparently unrelated people. Nick MacKinnon

On a visit to London’s Globe Theatre, help the actors to create the authentic Elizabethan experience. Bring along fruit and vegetables to launch at them during the boring bits.    The proud winners of gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show will be delighted to see you take cuttings from their magnificent exhibits. David Silverman

You need an oyster to pay for a journey on a London bus. If you haven’t got one, you can offer the driver some mussels or prawns.    Come to Derby, home of Britain’s premier flat racing classic. Nicholas Hodgson

If you feel tired, lying down at a junction of the M25 is perfectly acceptable. Chris Ramsey

On most intercity trains, a quiet carriage is provided for the hard of hearing. Here you can be sure that you and your companions will be able to enjoy a conversation. A.H. Harker

Running with the bison in Yellowstone National Park has been described as ‘an adrenaline rush beyond Pamplona’. Go for it, but don’t try taking selfies with the animals as you run. Chris O’Carroll

No. 3227: Mnemonic

You are invited to provide verses that could be learned to help children remember the sequence of the last eight US presidents. Please submit up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 November.

My tips for this season and a look back at our Flat Twelve

There are Flat people and there are jumping people. People like the late Captain Tim Forster, trainer of three Grand National winners, Ben Nevis, Well to Do and Last Suspect, who once declared: ‘One day I’m going to stand for Parliament. If I get in my first Bill will be about abolishing Flat racing and the second about doing away with hurdlers.’ People like Trevor Hemmings, the billionaire with the flat cap whose later life became a quest for Grand National winners in his green and yellow quartered colours, a quest in which he succeeded with Hedgehunter, Ballabriggs and Many Clouds. Sadly the kindest of owners died last month and won’t see his appropriately named Cloth Cap campaigned again for the National. Then there is J.P. McManus, jump racing’s biggest benefactor, who laid out no less than £570,000 for the juvenile hurdler Jonbon. Yes, that’s for a jumper with no stud fees to follow his career. It will be intriguing to see what Nicky Henderson can do with Jonbon and with Mike Grech’s Gallyhill, who set his owner back a mere £450,000 and whom the trainer describes as ‘an out and out three-mile chaser’.

A 23-5 trouncing by the Irish at this year’s Cheltenham Festival led to much soul-searching among English trainers. Willie Mullins, Henry de Bromhead and Gordon Elliott will challenge again for the top English prizes but Paul Nicholls has already responded the best way by sending Frodon and Bryony Frost over to Down Royal for the Champion Chase, the first Grade One of the season, to out-battle de Bromhead’s Gold Cup winner Minella Indo and Elliott’s Grand National hope Galvin in what may turn out to have been the gutsiest race of the season. Henderson too has responded by training 20 winners more than he has usually done by end-November.

Choosing a dozen horses for readers to follow this season I am ignoring Henderson and Nicholls stars simply in search of fairer prices. First choice is Venetia Williams’s Royale Pagaille whose extraordinarily facile win in Haydock’s Peter Marsh Chase last year emboldened connections to go straight to the Gold Cup, ignoring easier Cheltenham targets. Lost shoes, a foot injury and jumping mistakes found him out at that level but this season in soft conditions he could prove Venetia’s best horse ever. Then there is Ben Pauling’s Your Darling, a horse bought for the Vestey family by Henrietta Knight. There is no better judge of a horse and after his first bumper victory Hen called him ‘as good as Best Mate’. No pressure there then, Ben.

Next is my Grand National hope Secret Reprieve, winner of the Welsh version last season, who just missed the cut for this year’s race. Trainer Evan Williams has demonstrated that no one knows better how to prepare a horse for Aintree. I will include one of Henry de Bromhead’s because his Eklat De Rire, though a faller last time out, looks just the sort for races like the Ladbrokes Trophy at Newbury. I will persevere with Kitty’s Light, trained by Christian Williams and ridden by Jack Tudor, who was desperately unlucky last year not to win the Bet365 Chase. Paul Nicholls’s former jockey Sam Thomas has lately taken off as a trainer and his Skytastic looks a promising novice hurdler. So does Olly Murphy’s Go Dante. Among the novice chasers Kim Bailey’s The Edgar Wallace should win races. There must be a candidate from the Dan Skelton yard and I will go for Third Time Lucki, already a Cheltenham winner. There’s nothing like Cheltenham Festival form and a third in the County Hurdle brings in Neil Mulholland’s Milkwood while Bear Ghylls’s fourth behind the outstanding Bob Olinger in the Ballymore should lead on to a fine novice chasing career for Nicky Martin. With Fergal O’Brien, now linked up with Graeme McPherson, topping the trainers’ table through early season we must conclude with one of Fergal’s and I will go for Peking Rose, third on his recent hurdles debut.

How about our Flat Twelve to Follow? Of the 11 who ran, Aaddeey, Asad, Jumeirah, Dance Fever, Derab, King’s Lynn, Run to Freedom, Shelir and Thundering Nights all won, three of them twice, but over-ambitious owners and poor prices left us with an overall loss to £10 stakes in 64 runs of £130. The biggest surprise was that the gorgeous grey filly Albaflora, my most confident choice, didn’t win. She was though fourth in the Coronation Cup, second to Snowfall and Wonderful Tonight in top Graded races and finally a heartbreaking runner-up to Eshaada in a nostril-to-nostril photo finish at Ascot on Champions Day. As I commiserated, trainer Ralph Beckett smiled wryly: ‘She went out on her shield, didn’t she?’. More frustrating was mile handicapper Shelir who ran ten times. Before a 14-1 victory Shelir managed to be second successively by a short head, a head and a neck. For his final run at Ascot he was 40-1 and I played up the 14-1 winnings each way with a bookie paying six places. True to character Shelir finished seventh — by another short head.