Tsunami of piffle: Rockets and Blue Lights at the Dorfman Theatre reviewed

Deep breath. Here goes. Winsome Pinnock’s new play about Turner opens with one of the most confusing and illogical scenes you’re ever likely to see. A teacher on a school trip is showing her pupils a Turner painting displayed in a gallery housed inside a ship donated by the producers of a film starring a famous actress, Lou, who happens to be on board wearing a sumptuous outfit for an awards ceremony, which she plans to avoid for fear that a coveted prize will be handed to a rival. Lou invites the school teacher to an after party that is scheduled to start when the awards ceremony ends. She then gets distracted by the sight of movement on the surface of the Turner canvas. The painted figures, frets Lou, appear to be shifting and jerking. Then she reveals that this is the very picture that drove John Ruskin mad. The scene ends with Lou wondering if she too is going crazy. Play-goers will ask themselves the same thing.

Scene two, by contrast, is relatively simple. It takes place in a studio where a new movie about Turner’s life is being filmed. Then the action scrolls back to the 19th century where we meet the real Turner as he bickers with a black female orphan who shares his home. Is that true? Turner’s housemate was a black Cockney? The playwright explains in the programme notes that she completed ‘a lot of research’ before writing the script so she deserves credit as a historical authority.

The next scene shows Turner, aged 65, disguising himself as a one-armed sketch-artist and stowing away on a slave ship where he thwarts a rebellion by hitting the chief mutineer over the head with a wooden bucket. Did that happen as well? Later we see Turner enjoying a chinwag with a mermaid in grey dreadlocks who claims to be his mother’s ghost. Confusingly, the ghost is played by the same actor (Cathy Tyson) who interpreted the role of his black house-mate. Leaving aside fictional silliness and convoluted plotting, the problem here is that the budget can’t meet the writer’s ambitions. The play has 24 characters and five interconnected storylines that cover a span of 200 years. But the director, Miranda Cromwell, has been given just ten actors to play with. More money was needed, or less script. Someone clearly lacked faith in the project.

A lot of scenes end inconclusively with a song or a dance, or with an intervention from the spirit world. This gives the narrative a lazy and haphazard texture. And the script is full of footnotes from the thought-police. Lou describes Britain as an ‘abolitionist theme park’ by which she means that our culture is saturated with reminders of the 1807 law that banned the slave trade throughout the empire. According to Lou it’s time to pipe down about all that liberty stuff.

The movie concerning Turner’s life includes a scene in which an African slave girl is whipped by an English sailor but we’re advised to mistrust this tableau because ‘it sends a subliminal message that the white man has never been a slave’. What a puzzling argument: any historic re-enactment of white-on-black violence is bound to make white people feel superior and should therefore be discouraged.

Another of the writer’s injunctions is delivered by the ghost of Lou’s grandfather who challenges the value of equality legislation. ‘Their laws say that we are “like” them but “like” means “not the same”,’ he argues. So equality is a weapon devised by white people to oppress their black neighbours. Even the dance floor is included in the writer’s scheme of morality. A male character starts to sway to the sound of an off-stage melody. ‘Dancing,’ he explains, ‘is a physical expression of freedom.’ This tsunami of piffle will serve at least one sociopolitical function. If you don’t know how to think and you want to sound as if you do, here’s your starting point.

Don’t Send Flowers is an old-fashioned melodrama set in a therapist’s waiting room. The patients sit and chat to each other and their friendship blossoms into romance. It begins as an affair between shy Grace and cocky Louis but their love is blown off course by the arrival of sexy Joanne who has just six months to live. The characters are original, well drawn and easy to like. The dialogue and the acting are carried off with relaxed proficiency. And the unfolding story is a delight to watch.

One question though: where is this heading? It hasn’t enough dramatic oomph for a West End transfer and it’s not sufficiently distinctive to spawn a TV series. It needs a star to save it from oblivion.

The company features an ‘intimacy co-ordinator’ who supervises the scenes in which characters kiss. It seems that another innocuous aspect of the performing arts is being colonised by panic-mongers: the smacker!

Terf war reignites at Guardian HQ

Few issues divide the Guardian’s right-on journalists more than transgender rights. Back in November its longtime columnist Suzanne Moore was purged after an internal denunciation about her writings on the subject; in July its (current) columnist Owen Jones took aim at sister paper the Observer for a leader in support of free speech. 

Plenty of gossip is doing the rounds as to what the fate of those on the ‘gender critical’ side of the argument will be. Editor-in-Chief Editor Kath Viner is said to live in fear of the paper’s woke readers and staffers, 300 of whom signed a letter lambasting Moore for claiming that biological sex is real and it is not transphobic to say so.

Now though a fresh shot has been fired in the ongoing war of the woke. A key section of an interview with gender academic Judith Butler has been pulled from the Guardian’s website in which she compares ‘anti-gender ideology’ to fascism. A whole question and answer was removed from the article by the site’s editors, which included Butler’s use of the pejorative term ‘TERFs’, or trans exclusionary radical feminists.

Butler said the fact that ‘trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with right-wing attacks on gender’ was ‘appalling and sometimes quite frightening’, adding: ‘the TERFs and the so-called gender critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact… in favour of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism.’

Butler continued: ‘Anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times’ meaning that such critics ‘will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism.’

The academic was responding to a question by interviewer Jules Gleeson which referenced an incident at Wi Spa, a Korean spa in Los Angeles. Claims that a trans-woman had exposed themselves in the women’s section of the spa went viral and led to violent protests, the Guardian has previously reported. 

However it was the mentioning of this incident and the failure to include the latest facts in the case that led to the paper taking the question and answer down in full, according to a statement given to Press Gazette. A spokesman said: 

Still, Steerpike understands the move has not gone down well within those supportive of Butler at Graun towers. Already a social media backlash has triggered a wave of complaints amid accusations of cowardice from opponents of gender critics. Mr S wonders just where this will all end…

Barça’s golden age and its ruling triumvirate

Even against our better judgment we tend to imbue our sporting heroes with characteristics they may not possess. This can often lead to disappointment. What passes for fluency on the pitch is seldom matched with any articulacy off it. Lionel Messi, arguably the best player of his generation, is no exception. The Argentinian’s inability to communicate verbally has rendered him an enigma.

In Simon Kuper’s incisive and fascinating new book — one that charts FC Barcelona’s transformation over the past three decades from provincial club to international brand — Messi cuts as elusive a figure on the page as he is does off it. ‘Even now that Messi sometimes talks,’ writes Kuper, ‘he still shows almost no inclination to explain either his art or his power within Barça. It’s not clear that he is able to.’ Fortunately, Kuper, an astute journalist who has always brought intelligence to writing about the game, is well-placed to give an explanation. He has been able to draw on the ‘200-plus notebooks’ that he has amassed since 1998 and has interviewed most people associated with the club.

To understand Barça’s golden age (2008-2015), Kuper has focused on the triumvirate of Johan Cruyff, Pep Guardiola and Messi (the book is essentially split into three parts) and their common footballing culture. Cryff and Guardiola are more straightforward propositions, whereas, as we know, Messi is not. Kuper learns ‘by watching [the Argentinian] closely, and by listening to people who have watched him even more closely’. The ritual is always the same. In the opening minutes, Messi strolls around the pitch and observes the opposition set up their positions. He ignores a pass, unwilling to engage. Guardiola, his former manager, explains it thus: ‘After five, ten minutes, he has the map in his eyes and in his brain, to know exactly where is the space and what is the panorama.’ As one player later tells Kuper: ‘You’re playing here with the very best players in the world… but he’s quite far above that.’

Nevertheless, the star turn in the book is Cruyff. Kuper, who grew up in the Netherlands, sketches a convincing portrait of his childhood idol, a Dutch Quixote who played for Barça in the 1970s and then managed the club a decade later. He may be remembered for the ‘Cruyff Turn’ in the 1974 World Cup, but for many Dutch and Catalan fans who saw him play ‘the total Cruyff is [their] secret. Whereas Messi belongs to global culture, Cruyff belonged almost only to Dutch and Catalan culture’.

Cruyff the coach was as uncompromising as Cruyff the player, refining his own variation on the conflictmodel (a strategy of confrontation to improve tension and heighten team spirit) that his former coach Rinus Michels had employed at Ajax and Barça. (Cruyff also liked to keep a pack of loyal journalists to be unleashed whenever there was a perceived slight.) He invented a geometrical language for the ‘beautiful game’ and implemented the rondo, a piggy-in-the-middle passing exercise in the restricted space with defenders striving to intercept the ball. But he could also be oblique (‘even when Cruyff talked nonsense, it was always interesting nonsense’). He once told a reporter: ‘If I’d have wanted you to understand, I would have explainedit better.’

When Frank Rijkaard’s tenure as manager of Barça came to an end, Cruyff was asked to return with Guardiola as assistant. Cruyff declined. Guardiola (who had learned from the Dutch master) was ready to coach by himself. Cruyffian philosophy, or Cruyffismo, was now deeply embedded in the club’s culture: ‘Cruyff shaped and then anointed both the coaches who between 2003 and 2012 won three of the five Champions Leagues in Barcelona’s history.’

Barça’s rise to prominence had the good fortune to coincide with the emergence of Messi. The Argentinian seemed to embody Cruyff’s maxim: ‘Before I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake.’ Yet, if Guardiola was to refine Cruyffismo with any success, he needed skilled graduates from Barça’s academy, La Masia. Kuper believes the secret of La Masia was always the scouting, not the coaching. The formulation remains a simple one: brilliant players mean less coaching. The evidence is in a Masia roster that includes Puyol, Iniesta, Xavi, Busquets and Piqué.

What emerges from the book is an unrelenting culture of excellence. For Iniesta, a midfielder of sublime ability, ‘playing for Barça is not just playing a football match. It’s brutal pressure, constant tension, training perfectly every day, being the best in every match’. The club’s local fan base has been equally demanding of success, but not at any cost. Unlike Real Madrid, they want the spectacle first and then a passion to win.

Kuper’s intention to write a book explaining the club’s greatness was overtaken by events. He ended up recording its demise. The club’s motto — més que un club (more than a club) — was always likely to become a hostage to fortune. With heightened success came the requisite factionalism and financial irregularities (Messi and his father were convicted of tax fraud in 2016 but only handed a fine). The pandemic has hastened the fall, with the club now €1.17 billion in debt. Barça has acquired the moniker ‘the club of three billion’: a billion euros each for income, expenses and debt. Messi has since left Barça for Paris.

Ultimately, this is a tale in the Iberian Baroque tradition. Spain’s 17th-century poets had a word for it: desengaño. Rather than straight disillusionment, it is the concept of the scales clearly falling from the eyes.

Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature

It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power. Henry Channon’s political career peaked at parliamentary private secretary to the deputy foreign secretary Rab Butler, so he was well-placed to document, and sometimes actively to participate in, the intrigues of those who inhabited the Olympian heights.

Channon’s other great advantage was that he entertained — on an awesome scale. Scarcely an evening passed when he was not either hosting or attending a party in one of the capital’s grand salons: ‘All London,’ as he put it — by which he meant the great and the fashionable — flowed through his drawing room. As we saw in the earlier volume published this year, the King comes to dinner on the eve of the abdication crisis. Although, having backed the losing side during the abdication, Channon is now out of favour with the royals, he still has friends at court. His next-door neighbours are the Duke and Duchess of Kent. This was an age in which the country was still ruled by toffs. Just about everyone Channon knows seems to have aristocratic connections. The voluminous footnotes are a veritable Debrett’s.

Despite his undoubted charm and natural talent for social climbing, the key to his extraordinary lifestyle was his marriage. In 1935 Channon, by birth an American, had married into one of the country’s richest families. His wife, Honor Guinness, was the daughter of the Earl of Iveagh. She came with a considerable dowry. Her parents set the couple up in a grand London residence, 5 Belgrave Square, and a country house, Kelvedon Hall, in Essex. They also largely funded their opulent lifestyle. Even after Honor left (she ran off first with a ski instructor and later with a rough fellow whom Channon describes as a ‘horse coper’), the Iveaghs continued to pay his bills. In addition, they installed him in the family seat in the House of Commons, Southend-on-Sea, which he occupied for 23 years. It was later inherited by his son Paul.

This volume, another doorstopper, begins on 1 October 1938, the day after Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler in Munich, proclaiming ‘peace in our time’. Channon is a great admirer of Chamberlain’s and remains so long after such admiration was fashionable. By contrast, he loathes Winston Churchill (‘that angry bullfrog, slave of prejudice’), Anthony Eden (‘one of the most unaware, ill-informed people I have ever known’) and the other anti-Munich ‘Glamour Boys’. He regards the guarantee to Poland, which triggered the second world war, as ‘madness’.

There is a good deal of anti-Jewish prejudice. In April 1939 he is to be found praising Hitler’s Danzig speech, which he regards as conciliatory (‘good stuff… all my sympathies are with him’). June finds him celebrating Franco’s victory in Spain. Like many of his contemporaries on the political right, Channon sees Hitler as the best hope of destroying Stalin’s monstrous regime. It was not until December 1942, when Eden reveals to a stunned House of Commons the existence of the Nazi death camps, that a little light comes on.

Misjudgments are legion. This, on 24 August 1939: ‘The whole country expects war and only I do not.’ War was declared ten days later. And this, on 25 April 1940: ‘The country is definitely beginning to tire of Winston.’ Two weeks later Chamberlain resigns and is succeeded by Churchill. But Channon is not entirely wrong. Churchill may have been popular in the country at large, but he was unpopular in the Tory party and remained so for the first two years of his premiership, as one military disaster piled upon another. Although he became prime minister in May, largely to placate the opposition, he did not become leader of the Conservative party until the following October. Channon describes the atmosphere in Caxton Hall where the deed was done:

Halifax was in the chair looking more ecclesiastic than ever. The platform was crowded, but the hall not so; and I couldn’t but recall the last party meeting three years ago when Neville had been elected among such enthusiasm and hope. The atmosphere had been electric and wholeheartedly loyal; today many people were uncomfortable… the atmosphere was chilly, almost frigid… some people clapped without making any noise.

Despite the outbreak of war and the threat of imminent invasion, the great upper-class party continued. Throughout the Blitz and blackout Channon continues to move effortlessly between the Ritz, the Dorchester, Claridges and large country houses. Several nights a week he hosts parties at Belgrave Square. The champagne flows unabated and duchesses ‘drip with jewels’. This is his account of a party at the Dorchester in November 1940, 15 months into the war:

Half London was there…We had four magnums of champagne. I have never seen more lavishness, more money spent or more food than tonight. There must have been a thousand people.

Gradually, however, the war impinges. There is a servant problem: staff at the London residence are reduced from 15 to a mere six. Kelvedon is handed over to the Red Cross, though the owner retains a wing. His beloved son Paul is evacuated to America, along with his nanny. Bombs start falling: one, on Belgrave Square, interrupts one of Channon’s dinner parties. As the dust clears, the first air raid warden to dig his way through the demolished portico is an Austrian archduke (this is no ordinary world). Channon’s weekly drive between London and his country estate takes him through the East End, where he cannot avoid seeing the devastation. He starts giving lifts to hitchhikers (‘I am becoming very simple and democratic’). There are occasional visits to the constituency, where he briefly encounters ordinary mortals, but in the five years covered by this volume he does not make a single speech in parliament.

His personal life is complicated. In the heavily expurgated version, published more than 50 years ago, Honor simply disappears without explanation. Now Channon laments her infidelities at length. His own are also laid bare. He has an ambiguous relationship with his brother-in-law Alan Lennox Boyd. They frequently share a bed and at one point Channon asks Boyd to whip him. Boyd (a future colonial secretary) in turn appears to have the hots for a male US army sergeant. The great and enduring love of Channon’s life is a handsome major, Peter Coats, aide de camp to General Wavell. They eventually ended up living together, and it was Coats who ruthlessly censored the earlier version.

What value are these diaries? Without doubt they are a great work of literature. The pen portraits are wonderfully bitchy and razor-sharp. They shed light on a world that has largely passed away (hedgefunders have replaced aristocrats in the upper reaches of the Tory party — see the diaries of Sasha Swire); but they are primarily an entertainment rather than a work of history. Channon’s political judgments, although unfailingly wrong, were probably more widely shared than many would now care to admit. As for the personalities, his grandchildren were probably wise to wait until just about everyone who might have taken offence had died before allowing publication. So far as I can see there are only two notable survivors from that era: Clarissa Eden, aged 101, and the Queen.

In July 1941 the author’s patron, Rab Butler, was transferred from the Foreign Office to the Board of Education, and with that Channon lost his toehold in the political establishment. He never again held office. By the end of this volume he is hankering after a peerage in the hope of joining that privileged caste of which he was never quite a full member. As to his thoughts when the full enormity of Hitler’s regime was finally exposed and his old enemy Churchill was duly anointed ‘the greatest living Englishman’, we shall have to await the third volume.

Spectator competition winners: In memoriam Geronimo the alpaca

In Competition No. 3215, you were -invited to supply a poem about Geronimo the alpaca. The camelid’s fate was finally settled just the day before the closing date for this challenge, and your entries have an added poignancy now that we know which way the dice rolled for poor old Geronimo.

I admired Gareth Fitzpatrick’s touching clerihew and Chris O’Carroll’s Ogden Nash-inflected submission. Elsewhere, amid echoes of Manley Hopkins and Milton, was a nice spin on Gray’s ‘Elegy’ courtesy of Max Ross along with impressive contributions from J.C.H. Mounsey, Mike Morrison and Duncan Forbes.

The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £25.

They’re all leaning out from the Golden Bar, And scanning the Stairway to Heaven, The martyrs are hymning and stoups are a’brimming With innocent tides from the Severn: There’s St Joan with her pyre, St Bernard the Friar, John Foxe with his quill and his tome, For en route’s a recruit, who is woolly and cute, And they’re waiting to welcome him home   There are serfs that were breadless, and kings that are headless, And saints who continue to bleed, Preachers garrotted, and badger cubs slotted ’Cos that was what DEFRA decreed; The nation is grieving (‘they should have reprieved him!’), And Geronimophiles are in spasms. But beyond the neurosis, it’s tuberculosis With innocent blood on its plasms.  Nick Syrett

TB or not TB? That is the question. Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes. It could be croup; it could be indigestion, But now it seems they’re plotting your demise.   To live or die, O brave All-Black alpaca — Courageous son of proud Aotearoa? For you we dance the ancient, noble Haka: No Ka Mate for you but loud Ka ora!   You were not born for death, immortal llama! Tuberculosis? You’d have croaked by now. Oh! One more test shall end this dreadful drama! Bovine TB? You’re nowhere near a cow!   And spare a thought for plucky Helen Macca, Surely an inspiration to us all. She’ll never crack, she’ll back her black alpaca: She’ll never put you up against the wall. David Silverman

When I consider how your life was spent Cropping grass and causing no offence, Living as you should, where is the sense In cutting your days short without consent From those who care for you? Is their dissent Worth nothing in a world where rigid rules Demand that you must die? Are men such fools That they have no discretion? To relent Would cause no harm at all. Geronimo I weep for you as you await your fate, Dignified and tall, your soulful eyes Looking at the world as if you know What lies beyond your friendly paddock gate. If only human beings were as wise. Katie Mallett

Here’s cud in your eye. I’m alpaca, With a brave Amerindian name: I’m neither a swot nor a slacker, But I work for you all, just the same —   You can pet me or stroke me or fleece me As long as you don’t feel my head – I hear Defra has plans to decease me, But I’m no use to anyone dead.   You could say that I offer you karma, A woolly sensation, a lull, But be warned, I am no Dalai Llama — I will screech if you’re coming to cull.   I was worshipped by every Inca For my yarn, which is soft as a feather — George Eustice, you’re not a deep thinker And have no moral fibre whatever. Bill Greenwell

Kiwi alpaca! Trace Kontiki’s wake against the north Pacific’s westward flood; climb to the breathless crater where the lake laps at the Emperor Pachakutiq’s stud. There were your fathers bred — the quipu knots preserve the tangled archive of your blood, and there the hostage Chanka children spun your wool into the worsted of the gods.   Smallpox killed them. We will kill you too. Your lunar sacrifices are undone, and tourists rule the seat at Machu Picchu where Atahualpa hunted with the sun. You fled the horses to the Altiplano but Spanish steel becomes an English gun, and, for extinguished Inca culture, you must stand memorial, Geronimo. Nick MacKinnon

Because I am a cow I’m moved to wonder how a single camelid can leave this world, amid a frenzy in the press and a nation in distress. There’ll be a place in heaven for more than twenty seven thousand tested cattle who sadly lost the battle: I’m pretty sure you’ll find that no one ever signed a grand, world-wide petition to plead for a remission, which makes me ruminate on a bovine’s unsung fate. Sylvia Fairley

No. 3218: cooking the books

You are invited to submit a recipe as it might have been written by the author of your choice (maximum 150 words). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 22 September.

How the left thought they were right to fight the war on terror

Late one soft summer night in 1966, my brother Christopher slipped out of our north Oxford house and bicycled to the centre of the city. There he spent a worryingly long time with a spraypaint can, inscribing the words ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’ on a long builders’ hoarding outside Trinity College in Broad Street. You will have to work out for yourselves how I know this, but I do. The punctuation was perfect, and a handwriting expert could easily have told it was him. The slogan endured for months and even appeared in a TV drama filmed in the city some months later. This was how we felt then. There was no other cause so great.

Even on its own terms, the Vietnam war was a terrible error and multitudes did indeed die for a mistake. Its conduct was vainglorious and deluded, largely based on boneheaded bafflement that so much violence could achieve so little against such tiny, ill-equipped foes. Did they really not grasp that men will fight very hard indeed for their own countries? I am completely fascinated to find that so many people of my more or less leftist generation now wish to see one, two, three, many Vietnams, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria — and, I suspect, Iran and perhaps Russia too. They should know better.

It is in the curious and misunderstood events of 11 September 2001 that the riddle is answered. I must admit that, as a former Marxist-Leninist, I was far too cool and dispassionate about this outrage. I assessed it as a military and political event. I thought then — and think now — that people underestimated the importance of the fact that so many of the murderers came from Saudi Arabia. This does not mean that I was callous about the horrible loss of life. Nor does it mean that like a certain famous studio audience for BBC’s Question Time, I thought the Americans ‘had it coming’. I had stopped being a Bolshevik precisely because I had come to hate murder, and to exalt law and freedom. But it does mean that it was not an emotional occasion, or an excuse for a long-awaited change of course. So, as with the other various overwrought spasms of our age, from the death of Diana to the Covid panic, I was left standing on the corner pondering, as the excited crowds rushed this way and that calling for something to be done. I had had my emotional spasm, in private, long ago. I was not interested in having any more.

But for my former comrades, so many of them ex-Trotskyists or ex-communists themselves, including my late brother, they once again had a cause they could pursue with fervour and without reservation. Their hatred of theistic religion could vent itself on Islam, in truth a much more convincing enemy of bodily autonomy than modern Christianity. Their idealist admiration for successful mass violence used in a good cause could attach itself to America’s mighty armies, now spreading secular democracy across the world. Though the Cold War had been formally over for more than a decade when the Twin Towers were demolished, it still persisted in many people’s minds. The Blairites had been merely groping towards idealist war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, and conservatives had been bereft of an enemy when the USSR fell, and still longed for someone, anyone to take its place.

I think the true end of the Cold War, and especially the end of the left’s suspicion of western intelligence agencies and armed force, arrived 20 years ago. We now once again had a simple good vs bad world, like Tolkien’s Middle-earth except that in this version of the story the Shire has huge armies and navies, and nuclear weapons. And at that moment all the lessons of Vietnam, all the knowledge of folly and hubris that it had provided, were forgotten. Those regimes we said were bad were bad. Those that were bad, but were on our side, were spared criticism. And war was once again good.

This is how the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation bizarrely found itself deploying its forces to Afghanistan, nearly as far as you can actually get from the North Atlantic. It is also how, after launching a global war against al Qaeda, the USA found itself in Syria on the same side as the al Nusra front, at one time an al Qaeda franchise. And it is how the Arsenal of Democracy found itself supporting an unconstitutional mob putsch in Kiev.

Yes, the foot soldiers of the left marched in protest against the Iraq war. But it was noticeable that much of their officer class, in politics, culture, the media and the academy, were seduced by the war drums. The Blairites jeered that those who opposed the Iraq war were seeking to keep a ‘fascist’ in power. And in the name of this great idealist anti-fascist cause we acquired all the horrors of CIA black sites, Guantanamo Bay, rendition, waterboarding, torture in Abu Ghraib and, at the end, ignominious and predictable defeat amid the embers of the lies our rulers told. From this we learn nothing.

In the following 20 years, these utopians have responded to their failure by becoming a good deal better at lying to themselves and to us. If the war against Saddam were held now, and it was found that there were no WMD, the news would never get out, not least because supine media would classify the information as ‘pro-Saddam war crimes denialism’ and refuse to report it. The anti-Vietnam left, once a reliable army of doubters and critics, have become the warmest supporters of authority and enthusiasts for war. ‘Hey, hey, LBJ’ indeed. From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, we seldom have much idea of where we are going.

Life under the Taliban’s charm offensive

The Taliban Cultural Commission sounds a contradiction in terms but for all foreign journalists it’s the first stop in the new Afghanistan. There, in a dusty office on the first floor of the old Ministry of Information, I was handed a letter which allowed me to go anywhere in the country, except Kabul airport or military installations. In a neighbouring office I met Anamullah Samangani, a Taliban commander from the northern province of Samangan. He’s an Uzbek, resplendent in crisp white shalwar kameez, black waistcoat and black and white silk turban. He told me he has read one of my books. ‘Do you feel safe in Kabul, have you had any difficulties?’ he asked. He assured me that the new Taliban just want to be friends. ‘We have learnt from experience and now we want to connect to the world and interact with them in a good way, especially western countries.’ It’s hard for me to get my head around. Not long ago they would have viewed foreign journalists as potential targets for kidnapping. Several fighters I chatted to on the street exclaimed, ‘Why are you back?’ when they found out I’m British, but then they asked for selfies with me and sent me WhatsApps with flower emojis. It’s all part of a Taliban charm offensive, which started a couple of months back when they created a WhatsApp group for foreign journalists. The billboard at Kabul airport, which once bore the president’s picture, now proclaims: ‘The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan seeks peaceful and positive relations with the World.’ But the I ♥ Kabul sculpture on the grass in front has tellingly lost its heart.

Hard as it is to see Kabul like this, I was relieved finally to be here. I was deep in the Amazon, on assignment in a remote village, when Kabul fell. The village had solar power and a daily wifi hour, which was just enough to get a stream of texts asking if I was safe, as well as messages from Afghan friends begging for help to escape. I couldn’t believe that after 33 years of reporting from Afghanistan I had missed the main event. I couldn’t have been further away. It took a three-hour canoe ride, two-hour drive, eight-hour boat trip and three flights just to get out of Brazil. Then on to Europe; in Pakistan, a quick shop to buy a black niqab at the Dignity Store, and finally a ten-hour journey overland by road. Six PCR tests in two weeks — travelling these days is a complicated business.

At my hotel, Taliban guards held out a mirror on a stick to check under my chassis for bombs. The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, Lindsey Hilsum from Channel 4 and I were told by embarrassed receptionists that we must cover our heads even inside. That evening there was an enormous barrage of gunfire and I rushed out of my room thinking that we were under attack. ‘The Taliban are celebrating,’ shrugged the front desk manager. Out on the streets the Taliban were riding around in Nato-supplied police jeeps, their white flags flying. One wore a US army cap and carried an American M16. ‘Got them in Bagram,’ he smiled. ‘And these!’ He waved his feet, which were clad in new desert boots.

I have been here nearly a week and I have seen small protests every day from women holding up placards demanding their rights. Shots are fired to disperse them but still they come out. Women, say the Taliban, can’t go to work at the moment ‘for their own security’. That’s what they said when they took power last time in 1996. Five years later apparently it was still not secure.

A Taliban press conference was an invitation I couldn’t turn down. It was held in the government media centre built by the Americans at great expense. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid walked down the stairs, checked himself and then sat in front of rows of cameras. As a woman, I was made to sit at the side of the room. I waved my hands but he had a list of people who could ask questions. He answered them politely but selectively. There was only one question I really wanted answered and it will take months to know. Have the Taliban changed or is it just a façade to get foreign aid?

Many of my friends have fled or are in hiding. Only one was brave enough to meet up, a rapper. ‘I am OK — physically,’ she says. ‘Overnight we saw our lives turn black.’ Her best friend broke her acoustic guitar in half on the day the Taliban took control of Kabul. Every night since, the pair have sat on the roof looking at the stars and crying. It’s hard to imagine how once we drove around the city together in a taxi while she rapped. What was the point of the past 20 years? We gave people like my friend the chance to dream and then we snatched it away. Would it have been better if we had never come?

What Britain should learn from Israel about booster shots

It’s hard to remember a time when politicians have so publicly put pressure on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Even the vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, said this week that the booster programme is his ‘absolute priority’ as it will ‘help us to transition the virus from pandemic to endemic status’. So why is the JCVI so against booster jabs in all but the rarest of cases? My understanding is that its thinking has three parts. First, that the UK has not experienced Israel’s waning immunity against infection because we have had a longer gap between doses. Second, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been widely used here but not in Israel, provides longer-term immunity against infection than the Pfizer jab, which has been deployed in both countries. And third, although not explicitly stated, the belief we shouldn’t be using vaccines here when much of the world is unvaccinated.

The JCVI chairman, Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, hasn’t been shy in publicly arguing against booster shots. While he recused himself from all of JCVI’s Covid meetings, he says the developing world has greater need. I am told his thinking has influenced other committee members. So while the JCVI will not take a wider view on the effect of vaccinating children in the community in the UK, it seems happy to deny boosters to the UK because of the lack of vaccines available globally.

There are problems with each of these assumptions. There’s strong evidence of waning infection immunity in the UK: recent published studies from Oxford University and King’s College London have demonstrated this. Yes, Israel’s problem is more advanced than ours, but the pandemic has taught us that countries don’t suffer in lockstep — winter in the UK isn’t the same as autumn in Israel. The Oxford data showed, too, that immunity from the Pfizer vaccine was initially more potent than AstraZeneca’s; it dropped more rapidly, but that doesn’t mean it will continue to do so at the same rate. Immunity is waning. If the JCVI waits for perfect datasets before acting, we may all end up paying the price.

It’s entirely possible we’ll look back on this moment with deep regret. We’ve recently seen infection numbers in Scotland rocket. The amount of occupied Scottish hospital beds has already more than doubled in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, one in 75 people in the UK has the virus today, according to the Office for National Statistics. And infections in England are running at more than 20 times the number they were this time last year when there were no vaccines and following months of restrictions. With the return of schools and universities and the autumn weather arriving, we could very well see a big rise in hospital admissions soon.

Many find this a difficult notion — vaccines were supposed to end the pandemic, after all. A fundamental issue, however, is that earlier this year, in a desire to provide good news and to encourage people to get vaccinated, some politicians and journalists pushed the boundaries of credibility about what the vaccines could actually do. Yes, they are impressive against severe forms of disease, but they don’t stop the virus circulating as effectively as initially claimed.

Where Israel led the world in vaccinating a large proportion of its population, it now leads the world in seeing that immunity decay. Infections and hospitalisations climbed, as did deaths, but with the latter remaining lower than for previous waves of infection; the vaccines blunt the threat posed by the Delta variant, but they don’t eliminate it.

But focusing solely on deaths is glib, and ignores the threat posed by Covid. We didn’t have lockdowns specifically to reduce the number of people killed by the virus — that was almost a fringe benefit. As crazy as that sounds, we had them to prevent our healthcare system being overrun. Hospitals cannot work if they are filled with Covid patients struggling to breathe. Fill intensive care with these patients and there won’t be room for someone who has had a stroke or a car crash. Fill the regular wards with them and they pose a threat to other patients, and not just chemotherapy patients who have compromised immune systems. Anyone who has had an operation will have an impaired immune system for some time afterwards. Morphine and tramadol, common post-surgery painkillers, weaken the immune system. Give someone who is recovering from surgery Covid and there is a very real chance they will die. Covid patients not only take up valuable bed space, they also require special management to protect others. With community infection numbers so high, this isn’t a straightforward task for hospitals.

In Israel, 60 per cent of Covid hospital admissions are people who have been double vaccinated. In a population where 20 per cent of adults aren’t vaccinated, this is clearly a problem. It correlates with observations made in the UK that antibody levels drop a few months after receiving either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines. Similarly, the defence against infection appears to be dwindling here too. All this strongly suggests that the protection provided by the current crop of vaccines is transient and needs to be topped up, perhaps repeatedly.

In Israel the use of booster jabs resulted in a greater than tenfold reduction in the relative risk of severe disease, and an 11-fold reduction in relative risk of getting infected. For all the talk of the vaccine providing weaker than expected protection against transmission of the Delta variant, if you don’t catch the virus, you can’t pass it on to anyone else.

The booster jabs have also kept hospitalisations down in Israel. Last Sunday, there were 1,096 Covid patients in hospital, 54 per cent below their peak of 2,387 on 17 January. But because they only use Pfizer, our experience won’t be a carbon copy (while millions received Pfizer here, we’ve also used AstraZeneca and Moderna).

If boosters are employed here, a clear strategy of who gets what and when will be needed. Give people a third dose too early and their boosted immunity may well end up waning again too early. Professor Salman Zarka, Israel’s chief Covid officer, has already said his country needs to prepare for a fourth dose. The UK government recently ordered 35 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine for delivery in the second half of next year. If this isn’t to give people booster jabs, then what’s it for?

The government’s booster programme may well end up being overturned by the force of an incoming wave of infections, or politicians may just circumvent the JCVI’s advice, citing exceptional circumstances. Legally it isn’t clear what’s possible. But if they can’t do this, another type of political pressure may be brought to bear. The governments of France, Germany and the US are all preparing to give their citizens boosters. If that becomes normal, as other countries get to grips with vaccinating their populations, the UK could end up being an outlier.

The debate over emergency coronavirus legislation will heat up shortly. Opponents fear it will lead to a new round of restrictions over winter. On the current trajectory, that may not be unfounded. There were reports this week that the government is considering a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown next month if hospital admissions continue on their current trajectory. Admissions to hospital are 80 per cent below the January peak. On Friday there were 7,637 Covid patients in UK hospitals, compared with 39,254 on 18 January. But this is the summer, and on the same date a year ago that number stood at 817. The government has reportedly said it will only act if deaths rise to an equivalent of 50,000 per year. That sounds a lot, but as has been pointed out by Professor Oliver Johnson from the University of Bristol, it amounts to 137 deaths per day. The latest seven-day average is 110 and it is expected to increase shortly.

Unless the JCVI seriously believes that boosters pose a significant risk to the nation’s health, the price of not offering them will be paid in human lives.

Why I don’t stick to football

In football, you are always stronger in numbers. With a shared focus, people from different cultures, nationalities, races, sexual orientations, political affiliations and religions can unite to achieve incredible things. When you pull on that national team shirt, rivalry subsides and is replaced with a shared desire to win. When fans step into that stadium, for 90 minutes they feel a part of something, a collective, able to leave any worries outside those turnstiles. To many it is a religion. To me, it’s still a dream.

You grow up idolising figures in this game who turn out to be just like you and me. Human beings with human emotions and who, more than likely, have overcome some level of adversity in their career. Disappointingly for some, the ‘stick to football’ advice doesn’t cut it where I’m from. See, when my community had nothing to call their own, they always found something in the way of kindness to give me. I am a product of their compassion, of their drive and of their willingness to offer me more than what was on my doorstep. I’d be doing that community and my family a disservice if I did not use my platform to speak on behalf of the millions whose voices are not being heard.

A shoulder injury has given me ample time to reflect. While I wish I could say significant progress has been made to stabilise households suffering with food insecurity across the UK, the reality is it’s become much worse — 27 per cent worse than pre-pandemic. In fact, you could fill 27 Wembley stadiums with the 2.5 million children who are struggling to know where their next meal is coming from today. Low-income families are now faced with further deadlines, whether the end of furlough or the social security cut.

I’m not under the illusion that those in power have an easy job. There aren’t many of us who’d want to switch places, but regardless of the issues facing those decision-makers, our children should never be deemed secondary. Short-term solutions aren’t going to cut it. We need long-term planning executed well. Ultimately success comes down to communication — and this is where we have been falling short. Anyone who has followed my Child Food Poverty Task Force will know we have tried to increase uptake of the government’s Healthy Start scheme — which benefits low-income pregnant women and children under four. An extra 62,000 people in England are now using the scheme, but 40 per cent of those eligible (216,000 families) are still not registered. These parents will likely be found in communities just like mine — no internet, no high street, just word of mouth.

Adopting a grassroots approach to this child hunger pandemic is key. Those most in need of help must be able to gain access to the support available — door-to-door interaction, data capture and leaflets are vital for achieving this. The proposed digitisation of the Healthy Start scheme might bring some benefits, but it could put up barriers. Ofcom estimates 11 per cent of lower socio-economic households don’t have home internet access. Nor, frankly, do they have 55p per minute to activate the prepaid card via a telephone. It’s also problematic that those using the scheme have to reapply, squashing the work the Task Force has done to support the uptake.

Children are returning to school — a welcome step for some, a daunting prospect for others impacted by lack of social interaction and lack of access to learning during the pandemic. This summer, I spoke to a primary school teacher who had been concerned about a child who was continually falling asleep. The teacher eventually realised she was using her free school meal eligibility to wrap up food to take home for her younger siblings who didn’t qualify, understanding it could be all they’d eat that day. Stories like this are not uncommon. In fact, about half of families with children living in food insecurity are not eligible for free school meals. Education can be a positive avenue out of poverty, but if children are hungry, how can we expect them to engage in learning? That’s why I am calling on the government to expand free school meal eligibility, in line with the National Food Strategy recommendations.

Party politics has never interested me. What interests me is working together to find sustainable solutions. The long-term effects of a global pandemic will not be resolved with short-term relief packages. So it’s time for us all to unite with the passion we saw during the Euros and make sure every child in this country is given a fair chance, and that child hunger is eradicated. No child should be starting 20 yards behind any other just because of the community they live in. It’s time to level up.

Irish quartet: Beautiful World, Where Are You?, by Sally Rooney, reviewed

The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers (Irish Book Awards Novel of 2020) declares: ‘You have to truly love people to write like this.’

It’s hard to imagine that being said of Colm Tóibín or Anne Enright (let alone Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark). But there are new kids on the block, and forensically intense examination of feelings between pairs of friends or lovers have propelled the fictions of Sally Rooney into the stratosphere. The phenomenal success of Conversations with Friends and Normal People, along with her influential editorship of the reputation-making literary magazine Stinging Fly, have made her a power in the land.

Her trademark formula combines close-up physical observation, sharp dialogue, will-they-won’t-they haverings and plenty of sex. If the content seems vapid, that is no barrier to televisual impact. More interestingly, there is clearly an ambition to say more than she seems to be saying. The saving grace of Normal People was its beady focus on class differences in modern Ireland, too rarely addressed in contemporary fiction.

Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? has much in common with its predecessors, but rather audaciously tries to discuss their tricky inheritance through the persona of Alice, ‘widely despised celebrity novelist’, who has achieved meteoric success with her first two novels and feels bad about it. She is 29, the same age as her friend Eileen, an underpaid literary editor, and Felix, a rather unlikely warehouse worker. The fourth point of the quadrilateral, Simon, a religiously inclined ‘policy adviser for a left-wing parliamentary group’, is five years older. Eileen has been obsessed with him since childhood. There are fashionable nods to bisexuality, which don’t go anywhere much. The novel opens with Alice’s awkward first date with Felix, in a grim-sounding seaside town in the west of Ireland where she has holed up after some sort of crisis.

Few though their points of contact are, she decides on a whim to take him to a literary conference in Rome; they become tentatively involved, while Eileen nervously reinvigorates her on-off relationship with Simon. And that is more or less all that happens. The intersections between the four principals are retailed in elliptical conversations with no quotation marks, rather distracted, if heavy-breathing, sexual encounters (on one occasion via telephone), and interminable emails between Eileen and Alice. These missives theorise about life, love, economics and cultural alienation, invoking everything from the aesthetic implications of 1970s plastic to Mycenean culture and Manet’s portraits of Berthe Morisot. (‘Alice, do you remember a few weeks or months ago I sent you an email about the Late Bronze Age collapse?’)

It is very hard to know what to make of these emails. They allow for political discussion of a sort (Alice apparently ‘feels the world ceased to be beautiful after the fall of the Soviet Union’); but the Marxisant posturings never indicate any kind of commitment to action or involvement outside the world of personal relationships. Irony is certainly intended, but it comes with a heavy hand:

Do you think you’re the only person who has ever felt sexual desire? In case the answer is yes, I am attaching a PDF of Audre Lorde’s essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’, which I know for a fact you will greatly enjoy!

What is missing is the kind of skilful weaving of a backstory which gives characters substance, as practised by, say, Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout and indeed Natalia Ginzburg, on whom Eileen has written a well-received essay. Another of her reference points is The Golden Bowl, also a ‘quartet’ novel fuelled by explanatory conversations, which is — as she says — ‘juicy’. But there is little Jamesian juice here. An overwritten interlude describes a family wedding, clearly intended to give Eileen’s life some texture, but it comes too late and adds little; fundamentally, for each member of the quartet, their friends are their families (familiar Rooney territory, again). At the end, if they find a way to combat all this angsty alienation, it will be — unsurprisingly — by creating a family with each other.

At one point in their self-referencing exchanges Alice tells Eileen she ‘can’t read contemporary novels anymore’, especially ‘sensitive little novels about “ordinary life”’. Why don’t novelists, she demands, ‘write about the kind of life they lead and the kind of things that really obsess them?’ This conveniently leads to a disquisition on the economics of literary production in the late-capitalist age. But the main point is, as Alice says, that ‘if novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels — and quite rightly!’ Which may be the reason why, for all Rooney’s sharp perceptions and atmospheric descriptions, the 337 pages of this book are such a hard slog. Or maybe I just don’t love people enough.

French connection: how to make cherry clafoutis

My daydreams at the moment follow a predictable theme. I am on holiday somewhere balmy, with a carafe of cold white wine in front of me. Someone handsome has just brought me a large bowl of salted crisps, unbidden but very welcome, and the greatest responsibility I have is finishing the book that I’m reading.

The reality has been a little more prosaic. I am at my Manchester dining table, nursing a cold cup of tea, as the rain falls so heavily it’s like sitting in a drum. I’m sure I’m not alone: changing rules, quarantines, vaccination certificates, or simply the sheer weight of anxiety mean that the majority of us have spent this summer in the UK. I would give my eye teeth for a proper holiday.

If I could choose, I’d be in France. Nothing fancy, a small town somewhere warm, with cobbled streets, a good boulangerie, and a little bar-tabac that serves some kind of small, strong drink I’ve never heard of.

Predictably, I find myself focusing on the food. I miss salads with fatty lardons and a perfect vinaigrette. I miss little pots of rémoulade and sweet carottes râpées. I miss cauldrons of mussels, cheeses that are almost entirely liquid. I miss cool crème caramels, and shattering a crème brûlée.

Most of all, I miss clafoutis. There’s something extremely French about it: unassuming in appearance but showcasing the best of the season’s fruit. It’s effortless and elegant all at once — it is the best of French country cooking. And OK, it’s not quite the same making it at home but if the past 18 months have taught us anything, it’s to take our joys where we can find them.

And British cherries are wonderful this year: fat and bright and bursting with flavour. If you can resist eating them by the handful, straight from the punnet, then they are put to excellent use in a clafoutis.

The clafoutis originated in Limousin, central France. Its name comes from the Occitan word ‘clafir’ meaning ‘to fill’, thought to refer to the way in which the batter is filled with fruit as it cooks and inflates. Really, it’s a flan: cherries are placed in a single layer, and then a thin batter — somewhere between waffle batter and custard — is poured over the top, before the whole thing is baked until the custard is golden and puffed, the cherries squidgy and fragrant.

This being France, there are rules as to what constitutes a ‘proper’ clafoutis. The cherries should be morello or sour cherries, griottes, native to the Limousin region, but very hard to get hold of in their fresh state elsewhere. Strictly speaking, if you use sweet cherries, you are making a flaugnarde, not a clafoutis. But if Julia Child can write a recipe for a ‘clafoutis’ baked with apples, currants, and rum, I say all bets are off. I love blackberries or halved apricots, but you can use whatever you fancy — I’ve seen everything from blueberries to chocolate and hazelnuts (although if you’re opting for the latter, don’t tell the people of Limousin).

The rules also dictate that the cherries should be baked into the clafoutis unpitted. This is not just the work of lazy cooks: cherry pits contain benzaldehyde, the compound used in almond extract. Pit-enthusiasts will tell you that retaining the pits gives a more rounded, complex flavour to the cherries and therefore the clafoutis. They may well be right, but personally I can’t enjoy a pudding if there’s a good chance I’ll break a tooth on it. So I pit my cherries. You can add a nudge of almond extract to the batter to compensate for the lack of benzaldehyde. Removing the stones also makes it easier to macerate the cherries, so the fruit can soak up more kirsch for a tart, boozy hum.

When the clafoutis comes from the oven, it will be billowing and slightly soufléed. As it rests, it will droop a little. This may seem like a shame, but clafoutis is far superior when eaten warm rather than hot. Left-overs make for an excellent breakfast, served straight from the fridge with thick yoghurt.

How to make it

Serves 4-6 Takes 10 mins Bakes 30-45 mins

For the cherries

— 450g sweet cherries, stoned

— 2 tbsp caster sugar

— 3 tbsp kirsch

For the batter

— 2 eggs

— 1 egg yolk

— 60g plain flour

— 150ml whole milk

— 30g butter, plus extra for greasing

— 90g caster sugar

— ½ tsp almond extract

—1 tbsp demerara sugar

Take your cherries, stone them, and place in a bowl with two tablespoons of caster sugar, and the kirsch. Leave for 1-3 hours.

Make the batter. Place the butter in a small pan over a medium heat: it will melt, bubble up, and then quieten as it turns light brown. Remove from the heat and set to one side. Whisk together the eggs, egg yolk, flour, milk, 90g caster sugar and almond extract together into a smooth batter. Drizzle in the browned butter. Cover the batter with clingfilm so it touches the surface of the mixture, and refrigerate for up to 3 hours.

Heat your oven to 180°C. Butter an ovenproof dish, just large enough to hold the cherries in a single layer.

Drain the cherries, and place them in the dish. Give the batter a good stir, and pour it over the cherries, sprinkle with demerara sugar, and carefully transfer to the oven.

Bake for between 30 and 45 minutes. The exact time will depend on the size of your dish, but you want the batter to be puffed and golden, and to have set on top, but be a little wobbly underneath. Serve warm or cold, with thick cream.

Has it really got harder to see a GP in person?

Floating vote

Voters in St Petersburg were presented with three candidates all calling themselves Boris Vishnevsky, with two believed to have changed name and appearance to draw votes from the other. It is not the first time voters have faced a confusing choice:

— In a Moscow city election in 2019 voters had the option of voting for ‘Alexander Solovyov’ — though it turned out not to be the Alexander Solovyov who was in prison at the time and barred from standing.

— In the 2017 local election in Ferguslie Park, Glasgow, Conservative John McIntyre was elected, with many speculating that voters had meant to opt for an independent candidate called John Goudie McIntyre.

— In the European election of 2019, voters in the south-east region were offered the choice of two candidates called Alexandra Phillips, one Green and the other for the Brexit party. Both were elected.

By appointment

GPs were told to offer more face-to-face appointments. How did appointments in July compare with the same month in 2019?

July 2019

Total number 26.2m 

Face-to-face 80%

Phone 14%

Online 0.6%

Home visit 0.9%

Same day 42%

Within one day 49%

Within one week 69%

>28 days’ wait 4.7%

July 2021

Total number 25.5m

Face-to-face 57%

Phone 39%

Online 00.4%

Home visit 0.6%

Same day 45%

Within one day 54%

Within one week 76%

>28 days’ wait 2.5%

Source: NHS Digital

Tax returns

How much money did National Insurance contributions raise in 2019/20 compared with other taxes?

Income tax £193.2bn

NICs £142.8bn

VAT £129.9bn

Corporation tax £61.7bn

Fuel duties £27.6bn

Two decades on

Some figures from the 9/11 attacks:

— 2,977 deaths have been directly attributed to the attacks; 2,753 were in the World Trade Center or surrounding district.

— 2,605 were US citizens, 67 UK citizens, 47 from the Dominican Republic, 41 from India and 39 from Greece.

— There were 17,400 people in the World Trade Center when the first tower was hit.

— When the North Tower was struck, many in the South Tower reported being told to remain where they were. Nevertheless, in the 17 minutes before the second strike, 1,400 people are estimated to have fled.

Is it time to defund the world’s policeman?

It gets lost in the many creative purposes successive American administrations invented to justify remaining in Afghanistan, but the primary goal of the original aerial assault in 2001 was clear and primitive: revenge. Not always a dish best served cold. That military operation was an attempt to satisfy public thirst for payback, and also for agency. 9/11 made the country feel powerless. Given today’s glorification of victimhood, it’s worth remembering that when Americans were granted victimhood en masse, they didn’t care for it.

If in the eating revenge is often thin gruel, so also is the experience of being proved right. I opposed the extended occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m no foreign policy expert, but so far my rule of thumb for foreign interventions — ‘Once a hell-hole, always a hell-hole’ — has held up. In scheduling a scandalously shambolic withdrawal to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, Joe Biden has managed not to reverse the humiliation of 9/11, but to repeat it. Our would-be vengeance has merely punished the US a second time. We hear from all quarters now that the reputation of the US has been terminally trashed, and that from here on in the inclination of future administrations to bully into the affairs of other countries will be greatly diminished.

That should make me happy. Since the second world war, most US foreign military interventions have been pointless or worse. Ironically, the one act of poking the American nose into other people’s business that I regard as roundly productive is the one that got so much stick at the time: Bush Senior’s first Gulf War. He was given all manner of grief for not going all the way and invading Iraq — which I never coveted for the 51st state. Liberating Kuwait and going home prevented mission creep into doomed ‘nation-building’ while still sending a stern international message: you can’t take other children’s toys.

None of us wants to live in a world in which sovereign territory can be taken with impunity, and in this sense the first Gulf War drew a hard line in the sand that shored up international order for everyone. By contrast, most of the USA’s other military meddling during my lifetime has not palpably benefited the American people, although I’m sorry to say that I doubt this is the test to which decisions in the Pentagon have ever been subjected.

Imagining that it must cloak its -rationale in the guise of a loftier morality, the West in general has grown embarrassed by the naked pursuit of self-interest — and you’d think that only ferocious self–interest would conceivably motivate lavishing vast resources and thousands of young lives on these dubious adventures. I’d have frankly been heartened if the US really had invaded Iraq in order to confiscate the oil fields. That would have been rational. We’d have got something out of our $2 trillion. But no. We handed the oil fields back. We’ve no more to show for eight years in that sand trap than we have to show for 20 years in the other sand trap — although, to be fair, by helping vastly to increase the acreage devoted to poppy cultivation, which the Taliban had discouraged, the US did manage to finagle for its domestic addicts a steep discount on heroin.

In my quasi-isolationism, I’ve loads of company. In and outside the US, plenty of folks agree that these bungling intrusions into other countries have mostly given the American military something to do, the better to justify a defence budget that benefits a hugely profitable industry of sheer destruction; that policy wonks in DC do not know what they’re doing; and that the normal response to foreign troops in one’s streets is resentment, not gratitude. American taxpayers have reason to be irked by getting stuck with the bill for protecting the whole world, when any day now the rust–encrusted Brooklyn-Queens Expressway could collapse from the scratching of a single mischievous squirrel.

Because the case for defunding the world’s policeman is overwhelming, that’s not what interests me. What interests me is my ambivalence. I may have little faith in American governments to act wisely and justly. But I have no faith in international bodies. In the main, Nato is the United States. UN peacekeeping forces are a farce. So if the US is truly cowed (if not exactly humbled) and determined for the foreseeable to shelter in place, we’re looking at a future in which malefactors can get away with anything. Why, malefactors may think they can get away with anything already. Putin seized Crimea, and what happened? A few sanctions, i.e. squat. What’s to stop the guy from going for Ukraine next? Or Estonia? After the debacle of Afghanistan, would the US drive a modern-day Saddam Hussein from Kuwait?

I’m most leery of a world in which China is no longer afraid of the United States. China’s reneging on ‘one party, two systems’ in Hong Kong has cost the country a few chiding comment pieces in western broadsheets. So it’s all too easy to envision President Xi enforcing his claim to the entire South China Sea (much like a UK claim to the Atlantic) with navy gunboats. It’s all too easy to envision Xi finally invading Taiwan, after which an American president gives a stern, disappointed speech. Quislings in the western press promote the view that Taiwan is part of China after all, rather than a thriving independent democracy taken over by brutal military force that no one cares to oppose. China learns it can take other children’s toys.

If China moves on Taiwan, maybe it’s a toss-up which scenario is grimmer, the US doing something or not doing something. But Biden is unlikely ever to call out Beijing on Covid’s highly probable origin in that Wuhan lab, if only because he wouldn’t be able to follow up the damning accusation with a meaningful punishment. The ‘world’s policeman’ is now tooting about in little anti-hate-crime cars covered in rainbow colours.

Champagne, sex or the Tories: what could you live without?

In idle chatter the other evening, somebody pooh-poohed champagne. He was a brave soul because in certain circles — and this was among them — one is presumed to think the presence of champagne a mark of opulence, extravagance, a special occasion, a treat. In even more exalted circles, of course, a display is made of not thinking it a treat but a staple, and babbling in a familiar manner about ‘Bolly’ as though one had proceeded straight from the breast to the bubbly without passing through lemonade on the way.

‘To be honest,’ said my friend, ‘if Fate were to touch my shoulder and whisper that I would never drink champagne again, would I be bothered? It’s perfectly -pleasant of course, but not something I’d miss much.’ To everyone’s surprise almost everyone, emboldened, agreed with him. A discussion followed in which we volunteered other famous pleasures we could, if we were to be honest, easily do without. And some, of course, we could not. We did not all agree. I could live without white wine, but hardly, I think, without red. I could live without brandy, but life without whisky would be seriously diminished. Beer would be an essential, as indeed would lemonade. But the absence for the rest of my life of cake would scarcely be noticed — while the removal of meat pies would leave a deep hole.

We grew bolder. I mentioned that I hoped it was not my advancing years alone that encouraged me to admit that life without sex would be perfectly tolerable. Someone else dared confess that she could do without other people altogether, but not her retriever. I’d horribly miss swimming, and for me life has already been made significantly meaner because I can no longer run. Big drinks receptions? Sweep them away and see if I care. Actually I could do without books. But would it even be worth getting out of bed in the morning if there were no gardens? And tell me I’d never leave England again and I’d be tempted to end it all on the spot.

You, reader, will have your own — doubtless different — lists of essentials and in-essentials. The exercise has led me to think hard about perhaps the most troubling and challenging issue that professional pollsters face: ‘salience’. Don’t imagine I think they’re unaware of it. The pursuit of means to determine and measure the salience to voters of the things they say they want and the things they say they don’t is at the forefront of any political pollster’s mind. It’s well known that voters will say they want things they know taxes would have to be raised to pay for — and then, in the privacy of the polling booth, vote for the party that promises to cut tax. Such voters (I’d contend) are not lying: they’re themselves unaware of what they really care about.

It is very hard for a pollster to extract useful information from a respondent who is unaware of what he or she actually thinks. Pollsters do try. They ask people to list things in order of importance to themselves or the country, and there’s plenty of evidence that the things people say are most important to them do appear to be significant in how they vote. The perceived importance of immigration, for instance, did appear to correlate to voting intentions on Brexit. The switch among a key segment of voters from voting for Obama when he was a presidential candidate, to voting for Trump when he stood, can be correlated to the salience of healthcare (‘Obama-care’) in one election, and the shift in salience (to illegal immigration) in another. A polling expert to whom I spoke while writing this offered both these episodes as evidence not only of the importance of salience, but also of the sophistication of modern polling techniques in drilling down into salience: they had the numbers before the contest, and the numbers appeared to support the outcomes.

But here’s a thought. Healthcare mattered in both elections. Illegal immigration mattered in both elections. If between two presidential contests a huge body of voters can switch so easily in the relative importance they attach to the one or the other, might we not conclude that people’s opinions on both do not run as deep as they claim to pollsters or perhaps believe themselves? Maybe fashion has more to do with it than deep conviction or enduring passion? When all the media are talking about a subject, it’s constantly in the news and prominent figures are forever debating it, we know that, questioned by pollsters, the salience voters say they attach to the subject grows; and we know too that how they vote responds to that. To me, then, the awful thought occurs that voters’ preoccupations, though temporarily intense, may be shallow, however passionately they may express them.

But if I’m right and the currents that push our pencils to tick one box or -another are often only surface currents and easily influenced by fashion, am I not driven to an even more awkward suspicion? Perhaps politics has only limited salience with most people? Perhaps which party wins a general election, or who becomes prime minister, is itself not of deep-rooted importance to most of us? Perhaps polling is chasing its own tail when it seeks to establish the salience of different issues to a voter’s final choice — because that final choice is of little salience to him or her in the first place?

If Fate were to whisper to most of us ‘There will be no more general elections in your life’ — or even ‘This is the last Conservative government in your life’ — how diminished would be your prospect of living out your last years in happy and fulfilled way? We glimpse the ultimate politician’s nightmare: not that his or her principles lack salience with his or her constituents — oh no, it’s worse that. He or she and his or her whole vocation lack salience. Shall it be champagne, sex, or a Tory government? Or none of the above?

The political power of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown

There is a rather sweet moment in the middle of each Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show where, after some magnificently obscene one-liner, he addresses the howling audience. ‘I love you people,’ he says. ‘Just like me, you’re rough.’ The audience laughs and applauds at this observation of itself. The wall is broken and the performer and audience are as one. This is ‘rough’ used primarily in its north-east of England context, meaning not so much violent or abrasive (although both are also possible), but cheap and low-down and a little bit ugly.

Roy’s now 76 and has been knocking them dead for 40 years, packed houses wherever he goes. But you won’t see him on television. Nor is he about to be presenting The News Quiz on Radio 4, not least because they’d have to rename it ‘The Fucking News Quiz’ and it would be a lot funnier than it is now. He is shunned by the comedy commissioners because, like Bernard Manning before him, he transgresses. He does not share their values nor their multitude of aching sensibilities. They do not find him funny — they find him a disgusting throwback to a time before political correctness.

So no TV for Roy. But increasingly he is also persecuted by the Labour-run councils which still — for a while at least — run the large concert venues in the north of England. The latest to recoil in horror from him is Sheffield City Council, spurred on by the local Labour MP Gill Furniss. The council has supported Sheffield City Hall’s decision to ban Brown from appearing, and Furniss said: ‘There is no place for any hate-filled performance in our diverse and welcoming city.’ Furniss is as thick as mince, sententious, totalitarian: there is no ‘hate’ in any of Roy’s performances for a start. Just vast acres of filth. And neither she nor the city council should be allowed to decide what sort of jokes people should be allowed to hear. The consequence is that more than 30,000 people, mainly local, have signed a petition to get his show put back on, and a protest march was due to take place in the city on Friday. People do not much like the arrival of the humour commissars.

Roy is a good friend of mine; we Teessiders must stick together. He has become used to Labour councils trying to prevent him from earning a livelihood. ‘I understand I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,’ he told me this week. ‘But I’m not a racist or sexist. I’m just a jokeist. I just tell jokes.’ He added — unironically, I think — ‘OK, there’s a few fucks in my show, Rod, but only when they’re fucking necessary.’ If asked to describe his humour — bearing in mind that Roy isn’t one for a great deal of introspection — he will point you to Reg Smythe’s Andy Capp comic strip. That’s about right. Flat-capped, working-class northern humour. Andy Capp from Hartlepool, Roy Chubby Brown from Middlesbrough.

There is a broader psephological point, though. Here is my Roy Chubby Brown thesis — make of it what you will. Follow his tour around the north of England and I will guarantee that any Labour-run town or city which decides to ban him will not be Labour-run for very much longer. Because Roy Chubby Brown is the culture war writ small, and this stuff really, really matters to working-class voters.

Middlesbrough Council, for example, banned him from appearing in his own town. Bad move, bad move. Such a furore. The woman who enforced the ban on Roy resigned; the independents, not Labour, now control the town council, and Roy is welcome to perform any time. The Tees Valley mayorship went Conservative. So did the constituencies of Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, Stockton South, Hartlepool and even Redcar. As I say, this stuff matters.

I am not of course suggesting that Roy Chubby Brown was the sole cause of this massive shift away from the Labour party. It is about the contempt in which the Labour party holds the people it was set up to represent. The disdain, the disgust.

Another example from my home town, Middlesbrough. There’s an expensive art gallery there, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, opened in 2007 and intended to up the area’s cultural clout. Middlesbrough’s most famous artist is a chap called Mackenzie Thorpe, a former shipyard worker whose work is adored for its depictions of Teesside’s industrial past, its hard-bitten men and women, vignettes from the rough pubs of old gadgies drinking and men making their way to work, the foundries and plants awaiting them: Teesside’s Lowry, then. I’ve got a couple of Thorpe’s prints in my lounge and Roy Chubby Brown has what I think is an original in his front room. Middlesbrough loves Mackenzie Thorpe.

Needless to say, MIMA wouldn’t touch Thorpe with a bargepole. The work was way too lowbrow for those monkeys. There was no attempt at an accommodation: ‘Look, here’s your display of Mackenzie Thorpe, but why not venture into our other gallery where we have a video installation about used tampons which may well win the Turner Prize?’ Nope, no room at all for Mackenzie Thorpe. In the case of both Thorpe and Roy Chubby Brown, an elite which no longer had any real connection to the area which paid for its existence determined what you could laugh at and what art you were allowed to enjoy. This kind of thing rankles a little, no?

So keep an eye out at the next election for the fate of that sanctimonious besom Gill Furniss. Sheffield may be more ‘diverse’ than it once was and she may have a whopping majority. But not quite to the extent that she can pour contempt upon the traditional Labour voters. Watch out, in Sheffield Brightside, for the Roy Chubby Brown effect.

Boris’s premiership is entering a dangerous new phase

The announcement of a tax increase for both workers and employers to fund more spending on health and social care is Boris Johnson’s biggest gamble since he won the 2019 general election. He is betting that, under the cover of Covid, he can get away with breaking his manifesto commitment not to raise personal taxes.

Voters can be unforgiving of politicians who break their promises. Johnson is aware of this danger. Earlier in the crisis, when the Treasury pushed to drop the pensions triple lock — which ensures that the state pension goes up by inflation, earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest — because the Covid crisis was making it unaffordable, Johnson resisted on the grounds it was a manifesto commitment. (The triple lock was suspended for a year on Tuesday as the Tories attempted to show that all the burden was not falling on the working-age population.)

Why has Johnson taken this huge risk? Firstly, there is the sheer size of the NHS waiting list — 5.45 million and counting. It is going to cost a lot of money to deal with the backlog that has built up during the pandemic. Unless the government cut heavily elsewhere, which would be difficult for Johnson given the brio with which he insisted there would be no return to austerity, there’s little option other than to raise taxes. As one cabinet minister reluctantly puts it, if the Tories go into the next election with an NHS waiting list of ten million or so, that is an even greater risk to their re-election chances than breaking their commitment not to raise people’s taxes.

Secondly, Johnson’s manifesto — and his words on first entering Downing Street — had committed him to fixing social care and ensuring that no one had to sell their home to pay for it. There would have been a political cost for failing to fulfil this promise. One Tory strategist points out that since Johnson promised to fix social care in the 2019 election, what would he say in 2024 if he still hadn’t done it?

Thirdly, Johnson is keen to emphasise that while the manifesto committed to no tax rises, it also did not anticipate Covid. He hopes voters will understand that the world has changed because of the pandemic and so he cannot be held to his 2019 manifesto in its entirety. Though, even pre-Covid it was going to be almost impossible to deliver both Johnson’s commitment that no one would have to sell their house to pay for care and his promise that taxes wouldn’t go up.

The first hurdle Johnson had to clear was his own cabinet and MPs. At the weekend, the papers were full of furious briefings about how this move would be opposed. Ultimately, there has been far less Tory resistance than expected. A few ministers did wonder in cabinet whether it was really necessary to raise taxes, but no one came close to a Heseltine-style walkout. Tory MPs grumble in private about the ‘Labservative’ nature of the policy, but in the chamber there was barely a squeak of protest.

This tax increase marks a new phase in Johnson’s premiership. During the pandemic, the government spent huge amounts of money with little thought to how things would be paid for. Johnson’s acknowledgement that this period of emergency spending is over shows that politics is returning to reality. There was no guarantee that this would be the case. Over the summer some cabinet ministers argued that while the cost of borrowing was still low, the government should fund all the things it wanted to do that way. As recently as this week, Liz Truss suggested in cabinet that there wasn’t a need for tax rises. But in the end, the Tories have decided that after 18 months of extraordinary spending they must try to reassert their claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility.

That a Conservative government is increasing National Insurance to put more funds into the NHS (as Gordon Brown did in 2002) is a sign of how much British politics has moved to the left. One cabinet minister, however, argues that the creation of this health and social care levy might actually make it harder for people to call for more spending in this area in future, as ‘people will realise there’s no other way to raise this money’.

One thing that makes the decision to raise taxes slightly less of a gamble than it might otherwise have been is the absence of Nigel Farage, or a similar figure, from the political scene. It is easy to imagine how he might have exploited Johnson’s decision. Reform UK, the successor to the Brexit party, doesn’t have Farage’s ability to force itself into the national conversation.

Perhaps the biggest risk is that the policy won’t do what it is meant to do. There are two obvious ways in which it could fail. The first is that it doesn’t succeed in reducing the NHS waiting list to a manageable size. This would leave Johnson caught between two stools. He would have given up the Tories’ claim to be the party of low tax but would still be vulnerable to the charge that you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS.

The second is that the money never makes it to social care. Currently, the plan is that the bulk of the extra revenue will go to the health service and the amount going to social care will increase over time. Yet there doesn’t seem to be anything in the package to make sure that this actually happens. It is hard to imagine the NHS giving up money that it is receiving without a fight, and it is just as difficult to imagine any politician being brave enough to pick that battle. If the money does enable the NHS to clear the backlog, health service chiefs will say that it shows how the extra cash has allowed huge improvements to the service and so it shouldn’t be withdrawn. If the backlog hasn’t been cleared, it’ll be said that this source of funding shouldn’t go until the problem has been resolved.

The great danger for the government is that the NHS will keep coming back for more. After the Tories have gone to such lengths to declare themselves the ‘party of the NHS’, they will have little choice but to say yes. Voters might accept that a tax rise to pay for the clearing of the post-Covid backlog in health care is reasonable. But if this increase doesn’t do the job, Boris Johnson will have a hard time holding on to his.

How ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ is taking over China’s classrooms

From this month, in an extension of a personality cult not seen since Mao Zedong, ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ is being incorporated into China’s national curriculum. School textbooks are emblazoned with Xi’s smiling face, together with heartwarming slogans telling readers as young as six that their leader is watching over them. ‘Grandpa Xi Jinping is very busy with work, but no matter how busy he is, he still joins in our activities and cares about our growth,’ reads one.

‘Xi Jinping Thought’ must be taught at all levels of education, from primary school to graduate programmes, and there is special emphasis on capturing the minds of the youngest children. ‘Primary schools will focus on cultivating love for the country, the Communist party of China, and socialism,’ according to Global Times, a CCP tabloid. A circular issued by the National Textbook Committee Office of the education ministry says that primary school children must be made aware that ‘Chairman Xi guides the whole party and the Chinese people’.

Textbooks are tailored for each age group. Six- to eight-year-olds are told of the need to ‘button the first button of life correctly’, an injunction often used by Xi to stress the need for conformity and obedience from an early age. The messages to older children get a little more complex — but only a little. They stress the need for ‘absolute partyleadership’, with Xi at the helm.

The books often employ folksy homilies to make their point. One explains how Xi’s love for China began with a lecture his mother gave him at an early age about a patriotic Song Dynasty general. Another explains how Xi, who has no military experience, has a ‘deep feeling for the army’ because he wore military uniforms when he was a child. There is plenty of nationalist chest-thumping, as students learn how Xi defeated Covid-19, lifted China out of poverty and set the country on a path towards becoming a ‘modern socialist great power’. Graduate students are expected to be able to ‘publicise, interpret and study’ Xi’s thoughts, according to the education ministry circular.

In many ways the education ministry is to be congratulated for attempting the near impossible — to make some sense of the vagaries of ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’, to give the full title of the political doctrine first announced at the 2017 National Congress of the Chinese Communist party. Primary schools are merely the latest extension of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’. It has already been written into the constitution, and it is the subject of university courses and of compulsory study by party members. Party propagandists even summoned more than 100 of the nation’s top actors, filmmakers and pop stars to a special cultural forum in order to study Xi’s ‘Thought’ as a way of raising ‘cultural–ethical standards’.

Yet it has always been very difficult to get a straight answer to the question: ‘What is Xi Jinping Thought?’ Even hardened party hacks smile awkwardly and shuffle their feet with embarrassment, before changing the subject.

Xi’s ‘Thought’ can perhaps best be described as a hotchpotch of self-serving ideas. He peppers many of his speeches with quotes from Mao and Marx, but also picks selectively from Confucius, a man Mao loathed. Confucianism was the backbone of the imperial system, but Xi likes the bits about obedience to authority. He has also quoted philosopher Han Feizi, often described as ‘China’s Machiavelli’ (who was a favourite of Mao), using Han’s words to justify his ‘anti-corruption’ clampdown: ‘When those who uphold the law are strong, the state is strong. When they are weak, the state is weak.’ Mao used Han to justify the Cultural Revolution.

Xi’s ‘Thought’ lacks any real coherence, yet it is possible to identify three underlying themes. One is nationalism, bordering at times on xenophobia, and an associated culture of grievance. The second is to position the CCP as the natural inheritor and embodiment of Chinese tradition and history. The third and most important theme is Xi himself. The ideology, if indeed it can even be called that, is designed to justify his accumulation of personal power.

The introduction of Xi’s ‘Thought’ into primary schools follows a campaign to eliminate ‘foreign ideas’ from education, which has become a particular obsession of Xi’s. A party document ordered educators to ‘firmly resist infiltration by foreign forces’. China’s education minister declared that China should ‘never let textbooks promoting western values enter into our classes… Any views that attack and defame the leader-ship of the party or smear socialism must never be allowed.’

One overenthusiastic local government in Gansu province took the instruction to heart and posted images online of two women burning a pile of ‘illegal’ and ‘improper’ books outside the county library. They claimed to be following a directive to ‘firmly cleanse’ libraries to create a ‘healthy and safe environment for education’. The images of the bonfire spread on social media, alongside comparisons with the Qin Dynasty practice of burning books (along with the scholars who wrote them) and Nazi Germany’s book burnings of the 1930s.

The CCP has sought to depict Xi as a literary genius. In 2015, during a visit to the United States as leader, he claimed to have read the works of Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. That was nothing compared with his grasp of Russian literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov were among writers on a list he gave when visiting Sochi for the Winter Olympics in 2014. Trips to France, Germany and the UK have resulted in similar bibliographic claims. During a speech to the British parliament as part of a 2015 state visit, he quoted The Tempest, telling lawmakers: ‘What’s past is prologue.’

If Xi is widely read, it doesn’t show in his own literary efforts. The Governance of China, the bedrock of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, first published in 2014, stretches to three volumes of turgid speeches and writings. ‘Like spring drizzle falling without a sound, we should disseminate core socialist values in a gentle and lively way’ is one of the better lines in the 515 jargon-ridden pages of Volume 1. ‘Achieving the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people since the advent of modern times’ is another.

The latest extension of Xi’s ‘Thought’ has not gone unchallenged on social media in China. ‘Brainwashing starts from childhood,’ said one user of Weibo. Another asked: ‘Can we refuse?’ For older Chinese, a campaign focused on the adoration of the leader stirs painful memories of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At least it could be argued that Mao had a personality to make a cult out of, warped and dangerous though it was. Dour, humourless Xi is a harder sell.

The party also has a ‘Study the Great Nation’ app, dubbed ‘Xi’s Little Red App’. It contains images and articles about ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ and his activities. Users can take part in competitions and quizzes, testing their knowledge about Xi to win points and prizes. After its launch two years ago, the authorities claimed it was the most downloaded app in China and it had 100 million users — though not necessarily by choice. Not only was it heavily promoted by schools, universities and the state media, but its use is mandatory among civil servants and party officials. In order to obtain a press card and do their job, Chinese journalists have to pass a test on the life of Xi, delivered via the app.

The app had an extra feature: it spied on users. The Open Technology Fund, a organisation promoting internet freedom, found the version for the Android operating system, widely used on smartphones in China, had a backdoor which gave access to messages, photos, contacts and browsing history. It could also scan other apps on the phone and activate microphones. While users studied ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, the app studied them right back. It embodies the party’s stultifying propaganda, but also its deep-seated paranoia, both of which define Xi’s rule as he now seeks to capture the minds of even the youngest schoolchildren with one overriding message: it is their duty to obey.

Tales from the Gulag: why I’m helping survivors tell their stories

I trudge up the concrete stairs of a council block of flats in west London. Up three floors. Then along one of those outside corridors, past several doors until I reach the final one. It is already open and there she is — smaller than I remember and with a charming, friendly smile. I guess that is because Ivanna knows me better now. She trusts me more. After what she has been through, it’s not surprising that it takes time to gain her trust.

She welcomes me into her little one-bedroom flat and before long, I am in a different world — a world of Ukrainians, Poles and Soviets, deportations, helping resistance fighters, being arrested… it is a world of memories which mean so much to her. She is 96, and the people she was closest to are long gone.

I have come to make a new video recording of her. The previous time I came, I recorded her talking about being tortured in Poland — made to hold her arms up in the air for such a long time that it was agony, and also agony to bring them down again. She told me about being taken out to the Gulag in the north-east corner of the Soviet Union in a region called Kolyma. She had been dismayed that I had never heard of Kolyma. I think she nearly decided there was no point telling her story to someone so ignorant. But she relented and told me about working in temperatures lower than -40°C. Her group of workers were sometimes punished for an infringement of the rules by being made to lie down face-first in the snow, then get up, then go down again. The hunger was so bad that those who did not receive food parcels from relatives struggled to survive.

But when I met Ivanna some time later, she told me something she had not mentioned in that first interview. She had engaged in a secret romantic correspondence with a male prisoner. Imagine that! Love in the Gulag! It had started when she was in a group of women being walked along a street in Magadan, the main port of entry to Kolyma. An open lorry passed by carrying male prisoners. One of them tossed a piece of crumpled paper among the women. It turned out to be a heartfelt plea to exchange letters to ease the loneliness and hopelessness. Ivanna volunteered to reply, and a correspondence began that lasted 13 years. Meeting in the Gulag was impossible. And after they were finally released, years apart, family pressure, great distances and borders meant they never met at all. The letters from Vladimir were full of emotion.

After the interview, I go back down the concrete stairwell. Ivanna waves at me as I find my way out through a gate. I am pleased and relieved to have got a recording of this bit of history.

It’s bizarre suddenly to be back in the modern world — back to driving a car, eating out, watching TV. Twitter, as usual, is full of anger and scorn. It is a world where people get angry about things which seem trivial compared with the suffering in the world I have just left.

When I meet people for the first time, they naturally ask what I do. When I tell them, they often seem bemused as if not sure what to make of it. I imagine they are thinking: ‘What did he say he was doing? Recording testimony of the years of communist rule? Aiming to create a museum? Why?’

Sometimes I wonder, too. I don’t have to do this. I could be playing golf and going on holidays. It started when I visited the House of Terror in Budapest, which vividly records the reigns of terror in Hungary — first under the fascists and then under the communists. I came out thinking: ‘My children and their friends know little or nothing about this. They ought to know. The terrible things that were perpetrated under communism should be part of everyone’s core knowledge just like the Holocaust.’

A Polish journalist asked me: ‘Do you really think there is a possibility that modern Britain would turn to communism?’ I said I did not expect it but I wanted to reduce the chances. Or, to put it more neutrally, I would like to ensure that, if young people consider turning to communism, they do so in full knowledge of how the previous attempts turned out.

It has got to the point where I feel obliged to carry on. Last year, I recorded an interview with Uran Kostreci in Albania. He spent 20 years in jail because he was against communism. For more than two of those years he was in solitary confinement in a small cell, sleeping on a concrete floor. Since I interviewed him, he has died. He trusted me with his testimony. I feel a responsibility to him to preserve his story and, with luck, to share it with others.

It has become almost fashionable for young people to say they are communist. I sometimes read their righteously contemptuous remarks online. I am now too used to them to be surprised. But I wonder what they would say to Ivanna, or to Uran were he still alive. Would they say ‘Bad luck but you can’t build a great new communist world without hurting a few people on the way’? Or perhaps alternatively ‘Your oppressors were not real communists. I believe in true communism’?

I guess that it is easy to favour a political and economic system when you never meet any of its victims. Last week I came across one of the victims in an unexpected place. Wang Zhiming has been carved in stone and placed above the main entrance of Westminster Abbey. He was a pastor in China. He submitted to the communist regime but refused when he was told to take part in the public humiliation of landlords. These ‘struggle sessions’ normally involved torture. From then on, Zhiming was categorised as a counter-revolutionary and, in 1973, he was executed in front of a crowd of 10,000. He is now recognised as a Christian martyr.

He, Ivanna and Uran are only a few cases among the tens of millions who suffered under communist regimes. Stories like theirs have to stand for an unimaginable multitude of others. We live such different lives now — with cappuccinos, mobile phones and nail parlours. But it seems unconscionable to me that the great suffering that took place in communist regimes in the 20th century should not be remembered.

James Bond and the Beatles herald a new Britain

The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street established him as a historian with a confident command of a huge body of information, as bloodless and dry as the subject was. Embarking on Tales of a New Jerusalem, a history of Britain from 1945 to 1979, he has undertaken another marathon and earned magisterial rank.

Yet, from the first, Kynaston has shown that he is prepared to leave the bench to sweep the Ealing and Islington Local History Centres, Wandsworth Library, the East Riding Archives and especially that extraordinary resource, the Mass Observation Archive, kept in The Keep at the University of Sussex.

This is the fifth volume, just over half-way between the cabinets of Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, but the significance is in the title, On the Cusp, from June to October 1962 —

a moment marked by the release of the first Beatles single and the premiere of the first James Bond film on the very same day. It is not intended as a comprehensive portrait of Britain at this time…

This is history not by excursion, nor indeed diversion, but by immersion in an extraordinary accumulation of detail. As with the first volume, Austerity Britain: A World to Build, 1945-48, this one is framed by observations from ‘ordinary people’. It opens, on the second Sunday in June 1962, with 17-year-old Veronica Lee with her father at church, St Swithun’s, Shobrooke, in Devon: ‘New parson, who looked like a sparrow & whistled.’

Next we turn to Rev. W.A. Wood from St James’s, Accrington, in Lancashire. In addressing the local motor-cycle club, he compares

motor-cycle scrambling to the ‘scramble of life’, which got everybody ‘out of breath’ from time to time; and just as the riders had to clean their machines, so people had to clean up their lives through reading the Bible and prayer.

And then ‘a few hours later’ the author takes us to the World Cup quarter-final against Brazil. Neither of the two television channels covered it; instead, the BBC’s Light Programme offered, at 9.45 p.m., a recording of the second half. England were knocked out 3-1.

More knock-outs were to follow on 13 July, with Harold Macmillan’s Night of the Long Knives, when the prime minister despatched a third of his cabinet. Jeremy Thorpe, riding high for another decade, pronounced: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.’ Sir David Eccles, sacked from Education, complained that he had been dismissed with less notice than a housemaid.

Ferdinand Mount is quoted (from 2008) as saying that these sackings marked a watershed in domestic policy. Before then, such actions may have had some weight. Afterwards, ‘they appear more like gestures of impotence… dictated by the last by-election or opinion poll’. Kynaston notes: ‘It is a plausible case. Good days to bury bad news were still a long way off, but politics was now on that cynical, damaging path.’

Another neat insight into Westminster was the Question Time performance of Margaret Thatcher, one of two joint parliamentary secretaries, who answered not only 14 of the 15 questions but also the supplementaries. Temporarily without a pensions minister, she promised one of her own backbenchers to pass on his message about the plight of pensioners ‘to my right honourable friend when I have one’.

As to the state of the nation, the sociologist Donald MacRae suggested that Britain was ‘the only country where calling someone clever is to abuse them’. Anthony Sampson’s pioneering Anatomy of Britain appeared soon after, with the thesis of the ‘country-going-to-the-dogs inadequacy in the modern world of Britain’s key institutions and their leaders’. The response of a dismissive Simon Raven was to hold out instead ‘for the virtues of complacency, nepotism, charm and the amateur spirit’.

The state of agriculture and rural Britain is a focus. Between 1951 and 1964 full-time workers on the land had fallen from 553,000 to 333,000. Many of the broad seasonal rhythms remained largely intact, and while old-time skills such as hand-milking, scything or thatching hay ricks were largely lost, new skills and multi-tasking fell to farmers.

A more recent study revealed that most villages in the year 2000 looked very similar to how they did in 1940, with their church, manor house, rectory or large farmhouse largely carefully conserved; yet their shops, schools and pubs were steadily closing. Inevitably, as that devoted Devonian chronicler E.W. Martin lamented: ‘The dry rot of depopulation has drained away some of the vigour and variety of social life.’ A north-west Essex farmer said in the early 1960s about Elmdon: ‘If you passed a man whose name you did not know and said, “Good morning, Mr Hammond”, you had a 50 per cent chance of being right.’ While Kynaston wryly notes:

In the same week [probably in August 1962] a butcher, a stranger from Ely with seven years’ residence, said bitterly: ‘Don’t ask me! You’d have to have been here since Hereward the Wake to belong.’

Meanwhile, immigration was beginning to change this homogeneity. Kynaston computes that residents of West Indian, Indian or Pakistani origin amounted to some 630,000, or 1.2 per cent of the total UK population, making a selective roll call of ‘their human range and the diverse talents they had brought with them’.

With their two channels, television was broadcasting classics such as Steptoe and Son and Morecambe and Wise, providing some escape from drudgery, but again this had its effect on social interaction. A British couple living in America, visiting old friends in and around Colne in Lancashire, cut short their holiday by a month because ‘whenever we suggested an evening out it seemed people were either about to watch Coronation Street or were too busy discussing it to do anything else’.

In November, That Was the Week That Was made its first appearance, fronted by David Frost, who would soon prove keen to join the establishment he mocked. Here Kynaston drills a little to identify the ‘type of public figures whom Frost and co. instinctively felt less than warm towards’. Among his examples are Betty Kenward, Lord Denning, Julian Amery, Hardy Amies and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Interestingly, he furnishes another list — the ‘alternative establishment’, figures less ‘easy prey for the satirists’, citing Noël Annan, A.J. Ayer and Asa Briggs; Lords Harewood and Weidenfeld; Stephen Spender and Roy Jenkins. He says that one should have expected the influence of the former to wane as the latter waxed; but no, ‘the birth of liberal England — if indeed it ever happened — would be long as well as strange’.

The second half of 1962 was an odd, unsettled time, made more so by what we know was to follow in 1963, thanks to Philip Larkin: the invention of sex. And so, with all that promise, the next volume is to bear the title Opportunity Britain.

On the Cusp has been accused of lacking a theme — of being a rather short, thin, tentative, twitching thread on the journey to New Jerusalem. But in fact Kynaston has barely dropped a stitch. This pandemic-inspired swatch builds upon the prevailing idea of modernity, enhancing the richness of a deftly woven tapestry.

The hell of London’s ‘American’ candy stores

The British often complain about an invasion of Americana, from burger joints to twangy accents picked up from television. I love my adopted countrymen, but for an American living far from home, these complaints can be tiresome.

However, there is one Yankee invasion I hate as much as the locals do: American candy stores. There are now nine of them on London’s Oxford Street alone. A guy called Chase Manders is to blame; he started importing and selling American candy to Britain 18 years ago and opened Kingdom of Sweets on Oxford Street in 2012. Soon after, stores that once sold knickknacks to tourists started muscling in.

I paid a visit to see what all the fuss was about. Could these shops take me back to my childhood? The answer was no. I went to Kingdom of Sweets and to the nearly adjacent American Candy Land and found them to be almost identical in decor, and fully identical in merchandise.

London’s ‘American candy stores’ are most un-American. America is known for excess. Anything you want, any flavour, style, colour, any size, as long as it’s EXTRA EXTRA-LARGE. Choice is a form of wealth. So why not sell American candy to those Europeans who’ve seen these tantalising products in expensive American movies and television?

Real Americans don’t go to these candy stores. We don’t even really have them in America — except M&M’s World (more on that horror later). You can buy candy in any corner store, hardware store, gas station or pharmacy in the US. We rarely have stores just for candy. You can get it anywhere, and that’s how we like it.

I expected these shops to be soulless tourist traps, like so many recent additions to Oxford Street. What I didn’t expect was how sordid they are. At Kingdom of Sweets, ‘Cola Willies’, ‘Candy G-Strings’ and ‘Jelly Super Sperms’ are sold alongside actual sex-shop items like ‘Edible Body Paints’. Cola Willies? No respectable American would sell those, let alone use the term ‘willy’. There were boxes of Kama Sutra gummy figures, candy boobs (choice of ‘fruity’ or ‘sugar-coated cola’) and ‘Gummy Love Rings’ (not for fingers). The most shocking item was a lollipop quite realistically shaped like a vagina.

Americans think of Brits as uptight, yet it’s Americans who are actually pretty prudish about sex, at least in public. But that’s not the point. The point is customers of a candy store are presumably children. Or perhaps not. These American candy stores are aimed at the jaded and the joyless, a place to stock up for yet another hen party. They are an abomination. I resent my country’s association with them, and not because I’m a prude. I won’t apologise for their presence on the streets of London, because I do not acknowledge them as being American.

At least I’m not alone. The Google reviews speak for themselves. Visitors complain of candy being sold well past its sell-by date. The prices often aren’t even displayed. When I visited, there were makeshift price tags stuck on with Scotch tape.

Where did this candy-land craziness start? M&M’s World is the original of its kind. The first shop opened in Las Vegas in 1997, and bigger ones soon followed in places like New York City and Minnesota’s Mall of America before London’s M&M’s World opened in 2011. I first experienced M&M’s World in my junior year of high school in 2007, and I remain as baffled by its appeal now as I was then. My drama class took a trip to New York and it was decided M&M’s World was top of the itinerary. MOMA, anyone? Statue of Liberty? Hell, I’d have even settled for Tiffany’s and the rest of 5th Avenue, just please God not M&M’s World. What even happens in there? I refused to go inside, so didn’t find out. I killed time loitering on the street, bored in the middle of Manhattan, but I was resolute.

Call me a snob if you like — I’m proud that my 16-year-old self understood these venues for the rackets that they are. Google ‘M&M’s World’ and the suggested search is ‘What can you do in M&M’s World?’. Good question. Here are the top answers: ‘You can see M&M’s in pretty much every colour!’ ‘Print your own personalised M&M’s.’ ‘Watch the M&M’s 3D movie.’ ‘Get your photo taken with M&M’s characters!’

Back to American Candy Land on Oxford Street. My husband insisted I check it out because Kingdom of Sweets isn’t American enough. ‘Why is it a “kingdom” if it’s American?’ he asked. I looked for something appealing. Instead I found more Cola Willies and rows and rows of Pop-Tarts. 24kGoldn’s ‘Mood’ — the worst pop song of 2020 — blared from the sound system.

I couldn’t take it any more. I settled for three packs of strawberry Twizzlers, of which I’m still fond, and four individually wrapped Jolly Ranchers, watermelon flavoured. They didn’t have cinnamon. I blew £30 on this measly lot. The Jolly Ranchers were past their sell-by date.