The Battle for Britain | 21 August 2021

Bridge | 21 August 2021

Live bridge is back. It kicked off two weekends ago with Eastbourne’s Swiss Pairs. I went with my friend Ollie Burgess, and although numbers were down, things were as they’d always been: the same familiar faces and scarcely a face mask in sight. But after competing online for so long, it felt strange — like appearing in a documentary about how bridge used to be played in the past, with bidding boxes, Bridgemates and duplicate boards that we slid across the floor to the next table once we’d finished with them.

Soon enough, though, the sensation of real cards in our hands began to feel not just normal but pretty wonderful. So did the banter and laughter at the table, and being able to discuss hands between rounds with fellow players, including superstars like Andrew Robson. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed it all.

The Pairs was won by Claire Robinson and Szczepan Smoczynski (known by all as Saucepan) — a fantastic achievement in a tough field. On this hand Claire was one of the few defenders to beat 4H (see diagram).

Claire (South) led the ♠A. Deciding that her partner was likely to hold the ◆A for his opening bid, she switched unerringly to diamonds — not, however, the routine 4th highest but a far more thoughtful ◆2. This encouraging low card was a clear signal that she wanted a diamond back — she knew what her partner didn’t: that another spade wasn’t cashing. (Had she been the one with a singleton spade, she would have returned a high diamond to ask for a spade ruff.) Saucepan won with the ◆A, returned a diamond, and got his ruff for one down.

2517: Final line-up – solution

The unclued lights are the eleven England footballers who LINED UP at the kick-off of the Euro FINAL on 11 July. The shaded squares from top to bottom reveal the manager, GARETH SOUTHGATE.

First prize James Dowson, Throwley, Kent

Runners-up Steve Reszetniak, Margate, Kent; Helen Walton, Romsey, Hampshire

2520: 5 4 3 2 1

The unclued lights, two of two words and the others as four pairs, are of a kind.

Across

6 Rickety car – one cut off during July (6)

10 House-doctor, game to assist poor maintenance of biological conditions (12)

11 Ten expressions of 14 – just small amounts (5)

14 Appreciation from US actor (6)

17 Drafts of collages (8, hyphened)

21 Did a nose suffer from them? (8)

26 One gets caught in it! (3)

28 Conductors of new trams, that is (7)

35 Department heads of operational research need experience (4)

36 Sombre at first, then dark, then bright (6)

38 Gusher shows how to avoid any friction (7, two words)

39 Miller Close (5)

41 Very light is one such 70s fashion (6)

42 Estates seedsmen replanted (8)

Down

1 Rumours misconstrued by Chinese? (8)

2 Hottentot’s outside. Such fun (4)

3 Drinks the health of – Burns? (6)

4 Stormy Lough Tait lacking small island for cabin (6, two words)

5 Peace’s destroyed around this time by lark (8)

6 Old leather coat with pieces for retainers (7)

7 Heraldic device embracing two northern deep ravines (5)

8 Action completely adopting inverted interior design (9)

9 Bowls out the small county (5)

12 Broken cassette may set a precedent (8, two words)

15 Timber tree cut apart (6)

18 Rotten dates. It’s causing this (8)

19 Against the clock essay reproduced literatim (9, two words)

20 Posed with your small woodland creatures (6)

23 I am just a little behind to sacrifice (8)

25 Spoils Warwickshire’s first time at the crease (8)

27 Tailless bird in wild fens and swamps (7)

30 Entering northbound motorway, remain in the same place (6)

31 Solemn sounds from two pieces and old measures (6)

32 Cease to like awkward chap on foot (5, two words)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 6 September. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk – the dictionary prize is not available. We will accept postal entries again at some point.

Spectator competition winners: Mrs Malaprop turns tour guide

In Competition No. 3212 you were invited to provide a spiel that a well-known character from the field of fact or fiction might give in their capacity as a tourist guide to a capital city or notable monument.

In a hotly contested week, I was sorry not to have space for P.C. Peirse-Duncombe’s Tristram Shandy (‘To begin at the beginning of our tour — for to begin elsewhere might be a beginning though not the beginning and thence to a conclusion which we could not call The End, let us commence with this view of a tower, a mere 324 metres of lattice ironwork created by Gustave Eiffel…’) or David Silverman’s Buck Mulligan (‘Now behold Dublin Bay and its snotgreen, scrotumtightening sea. Thàlatta Thàlata! as the Greeks say — Epi oinopa ponton!…’).

Those who made the cut take £25.

Visitors! Let me traduce you to the beatitudes of our capital city and its hysterical heritage. You are standing in the infamous Trafalgar Square, containing Nelson’s colon, which approaches a munificent 170 feet. The statue and four lions at the base were cremated by Sir Edwin Landslide. Constriction started in 1840, but it was several years before its repletion. To the south lies Westminster; it is thence we shall be disported on a London incubus to the Houses of Parchment, where matters of state are concussed, and incisions made, as our leaders vote with their members. At present they are revolved in the day’s baseness, so we shall not enter. Let us instead turn our retention to the Elizabeth Tower, home of Big Ben, and the most aculeate clock in the… Gracious! It’s time to bring this tour to its inclusion. On leaving, retributions will be gratefully perceived. Thank you. Sylvia Fairley/Mrs Malaprop

Welcome to London, for which one apologises profusely. Feel free to avert your gaze, as I invariably must, from the nuclear power station masquerading as our National Theatre on our left. To the right, I suggest you close your eyes against an office block designed to resemble, of all absurdities, a gherkin; fellow architects and critics have been as delighted by this excrescence as the rest of us are appalled. As we crawl our way through environment-destroying traffic congestion, do struggle, as I do, not to notice the great glass stumps hubristically dwarfing such few aesthetically pleasing buildings as have survived the combined ravages of the Luftwaffe, successive metropolitan planning administrations and the too often carbuncular enthusiasms of the Royal Institution of British Architects. Fortunately, the subterranean fistula known as Crossrail is invisible from our coach but do shudder in sympathy with London’s violated subsoil. Adrian Fry/Prince Charles

And now, the Topless Towers of Ilium. Now, I know what you’re going to say, Madam: ‘Crenellations’. Yes. Titter ye not. Disappointment all round. Gentleman over there thought it was a revue bar. Following on… no prodding, Madam, not unless you’ve paid extra, we come to Helen’s boudoir. Oooh what a baggage. Had a nice husband called Menelaus — ironic, Madam, you’re ahead of me — but ran off with a man from Paris. There’s a lot of it about. She launched a thousand ships so she knew her way around a port or two. All looking a bit battered now; Troy, Madam, not Helen although I dare say being pursued by a Greek Army across the Isthmus takes it out of you. And so to the wooden horse. Would you want that in your hall, Madam? But it was like VE night in Doncaster. So they all got completely pillaged. Nick Syrett/Frankie Howerd

My dear wife Carrie and I like to think of the nice French city of Paris as our second home. What’s the good of a home if you’re never in it? There’s aways something to be done; a bridge here, an art gallery there, a church to admire. The tradesmen are, generally, quite obliging although in the outer suburbs they can be somewhat churlish of demeanour and less willing to indulge in a modicum of English banter. I would not advise sending back food that is not to your taste, as I myself learned the hard way, along with a lot of mots that were definitely not bons! The French seem destitute of a sense of humour, alas. The Eiffel Tower is a fine edifice, the like of which is unknown in London, but has far too many steps to count. Here it is worth splashing out on the lift. D.A. Prince/Charles Pooter

Let us go then, all of us, with the Embankment spread around the bus like a hedgehog euthanised on the tarmac. A cold coming for passengers on the open-top, but not bad for April. London Bridge on our right, commuters looking a bit rough, the river like a strong brown dog, sullen, untamed and intractable, sweating oil and tar. Up King William Street and that lovely woman isn’t stooping to folly, she’s picking up after her labradoodle. If you come this way, starting from anywhere, you have to put off sense and motion, but the Poultry lights have finally gone green and downhill is Tower Bridge, wide open like a dead mouth of carious teeth. The river is running softly, and because I do not hope to turn again, we arrive where we started, but now you know the place for the first time. Ta ta. Goodbye, sweet ladies, goodbye. Nick MacKinnon/T.S. Eliot

The beauty of Paris is that you only have to see very few monuments to encapsulate the city, and there we have it — gaze upon its glory and tremble, ladies and gentleman, and especially ladies — the vast, firm and proud erection of the Eiffel Tower, glistening and lambent in the wet morning dew, surging upwards and penetrating the sky, leaving it gasping. We may also look, of course, at the dark opening of the Arc de Triomphe, hollow but with an eternal flame deep inside. No more is needed for Paris, so we shall proceed to the Menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes — small now and restricted to smaller beasts, no great leaping stallions or rampant lions now, but we can watch the giant porcupines as they make love with exquisite care, and the Galapagos tortoises, enjoying the slow and measured Gallic lust, but howling in their very souls. Brian Murdoch/D.H. Lawrence

No. 3215: TB or not TB

You are invited to provide a poem about Geronimo the alpaca. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 September.

No. 667

White to play and draw. The conclusion of an endgame study composed by J. Hašek (1951). Black is preparing a queen infiltration via a6. But with the right move, White can ensure that is not fatal. What should White play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 23 August. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Ra8+ Bxa8 2 Nc8+ Ka6 3 Rb6 mate.

Last week’s winner Andrew Espley, Masham, N. Yorks

Containment

‘Exchange chess’ (also known as bughouse) is the chess equivalent of a three-legged race. It is played in teams of two, on adjacent boards with opposite colours, and it works best when nobody takes it seriously. The only essential rule is that when you capture an opponent’s piece, you hand it to your partner, who may later plonk it down on an empty square in lieu of moving a piece. A checkmate on either board wins, no matter how dire the adjacent situation.

A long time ago, when we couldn’t convene a foursome, a friend taught me to play ‘one-board exchange chess’. This variant, which I now see is listed as ‘Replacement chess’ in the Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, requires just two players. The only rule is that captured pieces must be immediately replaced on a different square; pawns can’t be replaced on the first and last ranks, and the way we played it, bishops didn’t have to be kept apart.

Exchange chess is fun for being brisk and chaotic. Replacement chess was, to my surprise, slow-burning and deliberate. What fascinated me is that since you can never reduce your opponent’s firepower, the only decent strategy is to contain it. My favourite ruse was to try to place my opponent’s pieces as in the first diagram, creating a traffic jam of queenside pieces which can be entirely immobilised by two White pawns on a2 and b3, so the nearly deserted Black king can be hunted down on the other side of the board.

The following game, won by Magnus Carlsen at the recent World Cup in Sochi, shows the practical importance of piece mobility in real chess. Indeed, computer programs often use the number of legal moves available to each sides as a component in their evaluation. In the second diagram, the splendid sacrifice 18…Rxf4! secured outposts for the minor pieces on f4 and e5, but more to the point, White’s queen and rook were soon doomed to wait out their days in the corner.

Vladimir Fedoseev-Magnus Carlsen

Fide World Cup, Sochi 2021

18…Rxf4 19 Qxf4 Bh6 20 Qg3 Qf8 21 Ne3 Bf4 22 Qg2 Rc8 23 Rc3 Rxc3 24 bxc3 Qc8 25 c4 b5 A clever way to force the en passant capture, since 26 cxb5 Qc1+ 27 Nd1 Qd2+ 28 Kf1 Bxb5 wins. 26 axb6 axb6 27 Qg1 27 O-O was still possible! Bh3 28 Qh1 Bxf1 29 Kxf1 and White is far less congested. Qa8 28 Kf1 Qa2 Cleverly hitting the Be2, to prevent Kf1-g2. 29 Ng2 Qa1+ 30 Ne1 Qb2 31 Ng2 Qc1+ 32 Ne1 Qd2 33 Qg2 Kg7 34 Rg1 Kf8 35 Qh1 e6 36 Rg3 exd5 37 exd5 Bf5 38 Rg1 Kf7 The contrast in mobility could hardly be more pronounced. 39 Rg3 Nd7 Preparing Nd7-c5-b3-d4 40 Rg5 Bxg5 41 hxg5 Ne5 Now 42 Qh4 Qc1 43 Qd4 (else Nd3) Bh3+ wins, so White resigns

Fascist, anti-Semite and dupe: the dark side of G.K. Chesterton

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this author is (with a few notable exceptions) horribly flawed — littered with misconstruction, omissions of fact and interpretive errors designed to present him as ‘an innocent, uncomplicated man, blessed with almost permanent happiness and having no experience of suffering — hence an ideal candidate for canonisation’. That flourish, appearing in Ingrams’s third to last paragraph, was a bombshell to me, though I understand there exists a sizeable constituency pressing for Chesterton’s beatification, rebuffed in 2019 when Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton condemned his anti-Semitism.

Ingrams’s predecessors are guilty of trying either to ignore or to cleanse what-ever might blemish the appearance of saintly virtue. Ingrams instead provides a detailed explanation of how misplaced loyalty to his younger brother Cecil led Chesterton to adopt the anti-Semitic views of Hilaire Belloc, to whom Jews were un-British parasites, consisting largely of bankers and businessmen determined to take over the world.

Chesterton’s fidelity to ‘the Bellocian manifesto’ led him in turn to support fascism. He met Mussolini in Rome, and when Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 wrote that Britain had no right to ‘issue a moral rebuke’, condemning those who disagreed for deferring to the same ‘Jewish conspiracy’ that vindicated Dreyfus. In the year Oswald Mosley married Diana Guinness at the home of Joseph Goebbels, Chesterton could write: ‘Fascism is worth looking at, whereas parliamentarianism is not worth looking at.’

Such pronouncements are nothing if not preposterous, yet are mere splinters compared with the industrial quantities of pine planking that comprise Chesterton’s disquisitions on the ‘Jewish problem’ which, he said, could only be solved by establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to which British Jews should be shipped. Jews, he wrote, ‘should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews’. It must take a loathing of considerable magnitude to propose that throngs of one’s fellow citizens, born and brought up in Britain, be forcibly removed to the Middle East. Short of which, he added — in a proposed article for the Daily Telegraph, which happily they declined to publish — Jews in Britain should be ordered to dress ‘like an Arab’ so ‘we should know where we are, and know where he is, which is in a foreign land’. Like wearing the yellow Star of David on one’s clothing, n’est-ce-pas?

All in all, Ingrams’s is an account of someone who wilfully followed the idiotic, bigoted views of fascists and anti-Semites, irrevocably tarnishing Chesterton’s posthumous reputation, something most biographers have preferred not to accept (had they done so, there would have been no occasion for this book). It reminds me of how Byronists love to imagine their idol a womaniser rather than the self-confessed ‘lover’ of 15-year-old boys.

Except that Chesterton’s depredations are worse in both degree and kind. From the vantage point of 2021, we view anti-Semitism through the filter of the Holocaust, because that is the obscenity with which such opinions culminated. And there can be no excusing it. You don’t apologise for fascism; our duty is to judge and condemn it.

Faut-il brûler Chesterton? Ingrams says that the Father Brown stories possess classic status and uses the term ‘genius’ to describe their author. But views as deplorable as Chesterton’s must and should affect our judgment of him as a man and, by extension, his writings, just as they have irrevocably stained our views of Pound and Eliot. These things matter. An artist’s inability to perceive the venality of fascism is a serious flaw in his or her moral and political judgments, which in turn poses a huge and unignorable reproach to the art. The ‘much-loved Father Brown stories’ are hailed for their humanity, but how is that quality to be squared with their author’s opinion of Jews?

Ingrams provides a thorough account of the evidence supporting the case that Chesterton’s views were assumed out of loyalty to his brother — but if granted, that would be inconsistent with the man’s supposed genius. In the 1930s, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Sylvia Townsend Warner and John Cornford, to name a few, recognised the evils of fascism and were prepared to fight it; Cornford died in the attempt. That Chesterton remained blind to what was transparently clear to them makes him a lesser writer and diminishes him as a thinker. It confounds his status as genius and exposes the absurdity of imagining him as saint.

Excuses abound in the world of Chesterton studies; would that they counted. It’s a given that as adults we reach our own conclusions about the world and take responsibility for them. Chesterton never recanted; he used his position as a journalist to promulgate fascism, and should be held accountable for that.

Ingrams’s book has much to be said for it, not least the attempt to put straight a disturbingly partial record. But he falls short of his own rigorous standards when he asks us to imagine Chesterton as a tragic hero. There’s precious little here to justify that, and in hankering after such a verdict, Ingrams opens himself to the charge of lacking courage equal to the evidence. This is ironic, given that his theme is pusillanimity — that of biographers, acolytes, scholars, groupies, and fascists such as G.K. Chesterton.

The Covid vaccines may affect periods. Are we allowed to talk about this?

It’s fashionable to talk about periods. Books on the subject, with glossy red and pink covers, are bestsellers. They have sassy titles like Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement and Period:Twelve Voices Tell the Bloody Truth. The Periodical is a podcast for ‘everyone who bleeds, and their friends’. And this being our ultra-capitalist world, you can obviously buy a T-shirt, notebook or phone cover with a period-related slogan slapped across it. ‘Anything you can do, I can do bleeding’ is one mantra.

I admit to having not engaged much with this world. My period has always seemed to me a private matter, of no interest to anybody else and only vague interest to myself. I feel a little uncomfortable bringing the subject to the pages of The Spectator. I do so because I was interested to read that British women have made 30,304 reports of changes to their periods after having received a Covid vaccine. I realised I am one of them.

I will spare the details but suffice to say that after I had my first jab of Pfizer in late May, my cycle was flung off course. I did consider reporting it to the MHRA’s Yellow Card scheme, through which people can voluntarily report any suspected side effect from the jabs, but confess I felt silly to worry. It wasn’t exactly a blood clot or a heart murmur. When I had my second dose, the man in the booth asked whether I had experienced any side effects. I mentioned the changes to my period. He logged it on my file, said it would be flagged to the MHRA scheme and a minute later a doctor rushed in to reassure me there was ‘no reason to be concerned that the Covid jab would affect my fertility’. I hadn’t asked if there was.

I wanted to ask how he could be so certain, given these vaccines are very new. But I was concerned that would make me sound loopy. Goody two-jabs that I am, I didn’t want a black mark next to my NHS number. So instead we moved the discussion on, landing on London’s best pasta restaurants. ‘Trullo is lovely,’ I said to the two men. ‘Do you know it?’ A minute later, I’d had my second jab and after the obligatory 15-minute please-don’t-faint wait, headed back across Westminster Bridge to the Spectator office.

Millions of British women have been jabbed, so 30,304 reports will be a tiny proportion: a negligible number, you might say. But it doesn’t seem negligible if you’re one of those women. I imagine many will keep a record of their cycle, perhaps in their diary or on an app, and will have noticed a change. In the US, one research survey tracking menstrual changes brought on by the Covid jabs received 140,000 responses. The two biological anthropologists conducting the research said they had expected to receive around 500 when they launched their survey.

The real number of cases in the UK is possibly quite a bit higher than 30,304. But it is awkward talking about what the jab has done to our periods. Friends tell me they’ve also been affected and nope, they didn’t report it either. Nobody wants to be thought of as hysterical. Emotional. A tad neurotic. So instead these conversations are going on discreetly, on WhatsApp chats, on internet threads, in hushed tones. Who wants to be accused of being a dreaded ‘anti-vaxxer’?

Is it ‘anti-vaxx’ to be concerned that these jabs may be having an effect on our menstrual cycles? I message a doctor who specialises in women’s health to ask if it’s normal for vaccines to affect periods in such a way. Not really, she replies. I note that women aged 16 to 29 are one of the groups most likely to refuse the jab. I do not find this statistic hugely surprising.

It does not seem surprising, either, that pregnant women are nervous about having the vaccine, despite the Royal College of Midwives and the Prime Minister’s pregnant wife, Carrie Johnson, suggesting there is nothing to worry about. ‘Just had my second jab and feeling great!’ she wrote on her personal Instagram page.

If you vaccinate an entire population, even rare side effects will add up to thousands of people. Is it so wrong to talk about this? And if the jabs are affecting so many women’s periods, who knows what else might be going on. Medical trials on pregnant women were banned following the thalidomide scandal of the 1960s. I suppose we can only hope and trust that Carrie and the midwives are right to advise all pregnant women that the risks of Covid are noticeably greater than the risks of the vaccine.

In another survey run by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in May, just under 60 per cent of pregnant women said they had declined the vaccine. They may not have been hugely reassured by the RCOG’s own literature on the subject. The official information sheet offers pregnant women two options: ‘Get a Covid-19 vaccine’ or ‘Wait for more information about the vaccine in pregnancy’. Pregnant women do not have oodles of time to wait and see how everything pans out. They could also be forgiven for thinking they are being somewhat strong-armed into taking the jab, given how keen the government is on pushing through vaccine documentation for the double-jabbed. But as the RCOG seems to admit, we could do with a bit more evidence on the vaccine and pregnancy.

Back to fertility. Dr Edward Morris, the RCOG president, has reassured women that there is ‘no biologically plausible mechanism by which current vaccines would cause any impact on women’s fertility’. While I am comforted by that, it is also the case that women associate their periods with their fertility. And there is reason to believe that the Covid jabs are having an effect on some women’s periods. A month after my second jab, I make a note that my latest cycle is messed up, once again.

America abandoned this fight before the Afghans did

The bravest woman I ever met was a schoolteacher in Afghanistan. She was a tiny figure in a black abaya and headscarf, but during the dark days of Taliban rule she had turned her home into a secret classroom for women and girls. Every lesson there was a victory against the odds. It was very difficult for her pupils even to leave their houses; usually they had to go out with a male relative. She would teach her class in whispers, everyone waiting for the sharp rap on the front door that would mean they had been discovered. When British soldiers arrived in her part of Afghanistan, Helmand Province in the south, she opened a proper school. On the day I visited, there were computer classes, paid for by the British taxpayer. The sound of women’s laughter spilled out of the doorway and into the dusty street. I wonder what has become of her now.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, told me earlier this year that the ‘Islamic Emirate’ would respect women’s rights. ‘Islam grants good rights for women,’ he said — for men and children too. We were speaking about the murder of a prominent woman journalist in Jalalabad, shot dead as she left the television station where she worked. Not us, Mujahid said, that was Isis.

He might have been telling the truth about that particular incident. The Taliban leadership has been trying to create a more respectable image, as hard as that might be to believe. The White House was much mocked for saying — as Kabul fell — that the Taliban should seek the international community’s good opinion, at least if they wanted aid. But a former minister in the 1996 Taliban government told me once that their biggest mistake had been in dealing with the West. We were ignorant of western governments and western culture, he said, we knew nothing of international relations: we didn’t know what we were doing.

Today’s Taliban are vastly more sophisticated than when they were last running the country. Their political leader, Mullah Baradar, has negotiated directly with a US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. The two men were photographed standing stiffly next to one another in Doha, Pompeo giving a rueful half-smile. Mullah Baradar wrote an ‘open letter to the people of the United States of America’ in February, full of carefully chosen words about ‘upholding and guaranteeing all rights of women afforded to them by Islamic law’. But then Baradar had also said in a speech: ‘The only work done under the shadow of occupation in the name of women’s rights is the promotion of immorality and anti-Islamic culture.’ Over the past year of what has been a masterful diplomatic effort, the Taliban have been saying one thing to the international audience and another to their supporters. What happens now to education for women and girls will reveal their true character.

Despite some shrill headlines in recent days, the picture so far is mixed. After the Taliban took over much of Kunduz Province in 2019, they allowed girls of 16 to sit their final exams. But in parts of Wardak Province, they closed schools for girls over 11. What happens can depend on what local people want. In some places, they have persuaded the Taliban to keep girls’ schools open; in others they seem to have agreed with the Taliban that the schools should close. And where they are kept open, often the Quran is taught and little else. At the very least, we can say that the Taliban have not issued a blanket ban on girls going to school in areas under their control.

Perhaps the outcome will depend on a struggle between moderates and hardliners. During the Taliban’s sweeping advance last week, there were reports of fighters taking girls as forced brides. And in May, the Afghan government blamed the Taliban for a bomb attack on a high school in Kabul that killed as many as 90 teenage girls.

Joe Biden ordered the US retreat from Afghanistan knowing what that might mean for women. Getting out of Afghanistan has been the President’s settled wish for a long time, not something forced on him as a result of the deal done by his predecessor, Donald Trump.

The rapid collapse of the Afghan government forces was still a nasty shock. Biden and his officials were not completely foolish to hope the security forces would hold out for longer than they did. There were 300,000 troops and police officers with modern weapons, artillery and armoured vehicles against — perhaps — 75,000 Taliban fighters with Kalashnikovs, motorcycles and flip-flops. But in the past, big changes in Afghanistan have happened not because of victories on the battlefield but because people changed sides.

In recent weeks, army and police units in their thousands just melted away, abandoning weapons and equipment, when faced with a Taliban force of just a few hundred. You couldn’t really blame those fighting for the government. They weren’t stupid: they could already see which way things were going last year when President Trump agreed a ceasefire with the Taliban, one that did not include the Afghan government. The US was off the battlefield; no one wants to be the last man to die in a lost cause.

A lot has been written about how useless the Afghan government forces were, despite all the money poured into them. The US taxpayer spent more than $80 billion in total, an astonishing sum. In some years, training the Afghan army was the biggest single item in the US defence budget. But Afghan troops in the field might easily be high on hash or opium. I watched a US army sergeant tell his men to ‘quit bitchin’ about the Afghans being on drugs half the time and just accept the situation.

Being on drugs was a rational response to being in the Afghan army. The chances were high that you would be killed: some 60,000 government troops have died in the war with the Taliban. And you would often meet Afghan soldiers who had not even been paid, the money held back by corrupt officers or because of the government’s inefficiency and incompetence.

Individual units trained by the US, or Britain, could be brave and effective, in particular the Afghan Special Forces. They would have small victories, but those successes could never be sustained. American generals and politicians were always — in Vietnam fashion — intoning that Afghanistan was about to turn the corner: one more year, one more push. President Biden has finally called a halt to this. Only 3,000 US troops were in Afghanistan when he took office, and casualties were slight: more died in training accidents in the US last year. But neither was there any end in sight to the ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan.

Nation-building in Afghanistan was always going to be hard — even futile — but we didn’t help ourselves. Soon after the British army arrived in Helmand in 2006, I was there for a visit by a British government minister. He met the governor and then asked to see some ‘ordinary, hardworking Afghans’. His hosts were dismayed: this wasn’t on the programme. But British and Afghan officials — plus bodyguards — trailed reluctantly into the street, where they found a single Afghan. This man looked puzzled at being accosted by a slightly manic figure in a tweed jacket speaking English, but he listened politely. The minister gave a speech to his audience of one about the importance of ‘stakeholders’ in Helmand. The man nodded along but clearly hadn’t understood what the minister was talking about.

Westerners and Afghans often spoke to each other through such a fog of incomprehension. It’s true that some Afghans — like the schoolteacher I met in Helmand — were overjoyed with the American and European presence. But many others, especially in the countryside, were deeply conservative and longed for the return of the Islamic Emirate. Twenty years on, it has. It’s as if we were never there at all.

Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else: the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement

Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much later, and their intricacies can be boring. Politicians often include brief accounts in their memoirs, but these seldom reveal much about the process as a whole because, as I discovered by interviewing scores of them for my biography of Margaret Thatcher, they cannot avoid focussing almost exclusivelyon what they did and said (or think they did and said).

This book, however, overcomes the secrecy rule, because it is published nearly 40 years after the events described; and it overcomes the boredom problem because of the literary skill and intellectual grasp of its author. It is clear, precise, readable, sometimes drily funny.

The late Sir David Goodall, a Foreign Office man, held high rank in the Cabinet Office for most of the period when the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) of 1985 was conceived, written and performed. Indeed, though he modestly does not say so, it might not have happened if he and the then cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, had not been in their posts. It was Goodall, in a walk along the Grand Canal in Dublin, who first received (from his opposite number Michael Lillis) the Irish government’s ideas.

Goodall kindly showed me his memoir to help my biography. This book edits, comments on and publishes his account in full for the first time. The editor, the publisher and almost all the contributors are Irish, a fact which emphasises the direction of the negotiations.

As the author saw it, the purpose was ‘according the Irish [by which he means the government of the Republic] some form of political involvement in Northern Ireland in return for a formal Irish recognition of the Union’. The most important person who wanted this was the Irish prime minister from 1982, Garret FitzGerald, a man with no visceral anti-Britishness and a great deal of donnish charm.

The most important person who did not much like this ‘basic equation’ was Mrs Thatcher. She most sincerely wanted peace in Northern Ireland, but she lacked sympathy for Irish nationalism, and did not believe the Republic had the right to get constitutionally involved, especially as it never fully delivered its oft-promised action against IRA terrorists hiding in the south. Despite some cheap shots aimed at Fitz-Gerald in her memoirs, however, she did like and respect him, but she found his stream of fast, soft-spoken speech so hard to hear that he tired her out.

In formal terms, the negotiations were between the governments in London and Dublin, but in reality the two sides were Margaret Thatcher (with a little help from the Northern Ireland Office) vs everyone else — notably Fitzgerald and political colleagues; the foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe; Armstrong and his Irish counterpart, Dermot Nally; Goodall and Lillis. The latter grouping kept asking one another versions of Howe’s question: ‘Are we winning?’ Howe did not mean ‘Are we winning for Britain?’ but ‘Are we winning against her?’

‘I was always thinking about Ireland,’ Goodall told me — a surprising thing for a British civil servant to say. Northern Ireland, that place apart, featured oddly little in Goodall’s thinking. Indeed, when he became involved in the process which led to the agreement, he had never been there. Although a shrewd observer, and sometimes even admirer of her methods, he was often upset by Thatcher’s approach. Her outbursts, he noted, were the authentic echo of ‘British ignorance, arrogance, contempt and dislike for Ireland down the ages’.

On the whole, Goodall’s side was winning. Thatcher was not well placed to shape the process. She had views about Northern Ireland, but no coherent alternative to propose. She was a Unionist, but she was unimpressed by Ulster’s Unionists. She might be prime minister but, on this subject, she had hardly any useful allies. Republican terrorists had murdered her best adviser, Airey Neave, in 1979.

The AIA was a true success in one very important respect: it firmly, for the first time, established trust between London and Dublin and thus a common purpose about the need for peace in the north. This proved foundational for the process which led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. For this, the subtlety and goodwill of Armstrong and Goodall deserve high praise. Even today, with all the tensions over Brexit, Dublin communicates much more sensibly with London than does Brussels.

In another respect, however, the AIA failed, and was bound to do so. This was because the process had excluded the Unionists, whereas John Hume’s nationalist SDLP had been briefed throughout. The majority in the community were accorded fewer rights than the minority. So the deal could not ‘take’. It was diplomatic, not democratic.

This is part of the reason why Good Friday 1998 has not produced resurrection in Northern Ireland. It cleverly divided the spoils, but it did not bury the hatchet.

Contains moments of spellbinding banality: Radio 4’s The Poet Laureate has Gone to his Shed reviewed

The interview podcast is a genre immoderately drawn to gimmicks, as the logical space of possible formats is gradually exhausted. The interviewee, quite often themselves a podcaster, might be, for example, invited to noisily eat lunch while nominating their top-five deceased childhood pets.

The theory is that fanciful formats encourage the interviewee to open up. Under such conditions, the interview itself can come to seem incidental to the main event, the atmosphere chummy, comfortable, back-scratching, but fundamentally uninterested: you do my interview, I’ll do yours, no real questions asked.

The moderately fanciful premise of The Poet Laureate has Gone to his Shed sees the poet Simon Armitage solitary and at work in his garden shed, turning out haiku as part of a summer project. He is glad of interruption, though, and each week a well-known friend or fellow artist — J.K. Rowling, Antony Gormley, Johnny Marr — is invited ‘to call in for a natter’, answer a playful questionnaire, bring a ‘show-and-tell’ object and sample ‘a little tot of laureate sherry’. The fanciful premise — or, rather, premises — of the shed is forgotten with pleasing efficiency. (‘Did sheds figure in your upbringing?’ Armitage asks one guest, a little half–heartedly, before moving on.)

These are not so much interviews as overheard conversations, the listener forced into the posture of eavesdropper. (‘Put your ear to one of the many knotholes in the wall’, Armitage directs us.) Suitably positioned, we enjoy moments of occasionally spellbinding banality. There is something about Armitage — his subdued but obvious kindliness; his Eeyoreish voice — that compels his guests to lockstep at his undemanding tempo. ‘I like a plain Hula Hoop’, he muses during an unhurried digression about crisps with Jo Whiley, ‘though not in a sandwich.’

At other points, he describes in detail his lawn-mowing technique, reminisces about the M62 motorway and gets J.K. Rowling to confess that she ‘once wrote a paragraph of Harry Potter sitting on a public loo’. After some time, though, these wandering, aimless conversations take on their own restful, hypnotic quality. (Not to be listened to while driving.)

Rather than merely ‘having’ a conversation, Manatomy is an attempt to do that more progressive thing and ‘start’ one. Each week comedian Danny Wallace and ex-editor of Men’s Health Phil Hilton ask a famous male guest on ‘to talk frankly about his body’. First he is invited to describe it. Then he is encouraged to dwell for an hour or so on his various ‘hang-ups’. It feels like the kind of discussion where all participants should be seated in a circle on plastic chairs. There is a high premium on disclosure (‘I’m kind of hoping people will discuss their genitalia’, Hilton says in anticipation), and a broad embrace of a transatlantic vocabulary of affirmation and self-acceptance.

Manatomy doesn’t quite succeed. Though impeccably well-intentioned, it feels over long, sometimes a little mindless, and neither Hilton nor Wallace (who for some reason puts on this distracting, strangely modulating, big-money-Lotto-Rollover voice) does enough to focus the discussion.

There are some jarring incongruities of tone, too. For instance, the pair disparage unrealistic or undesirable ideals of machismo, but then invite listeners to nominate their favoured paragons of manliness — Sean Connery, Bruce Lee, Arnold Schwarzenegger — and refer to one another in gruff-voice as ‘man-sized’ and ‘units’. (Episode two’s guest, Tom Allen, is a useful antidote here: ‘I largely based my identity on Anthony Hopkins’s character in The Remains of the Day’.) In fact, the show is vastly improved when the guest is able to steer it in a biographical direction: Allen on his long-standing attraction to repressive etiquette manuals and buttoned-up 19th-century dress, for example, or Marcus Brigstocke on his history of childhood obesity and addiction (Wallace, in his Alan Partridge voice: ‘So, by 17, you were a 5ft 9in Goth weighing 336 lbs?’)

I wonder, however, whether Manatomy will in the end have to contend with the unwelcome fact that no one’s physical appearance is as fascinating to anyone else as it is to themselves. Further, the mooted generic problems (of how to tend to one’s hairy shoulders, or of being slightly shorter than one’s girlfriend; the morality of using your ‘wife’s lady-razor in the shower as a neatening-up tool’) do not constitute the material dilemmas of anyone’s existence, not even men’s, and they do not take an hour to contemplate.

Even the Taliban are in shock: my week on the Kabul front line

I’ve been to the front line in Iraq, Syria and Libya and witnessed all kinds of crazy, unlikely events. But I have never seen anything like what’s happening in Kabul. Only two weeks ago, I was reporting for CNN in the city of Kandahar. It was clear that this provincial capital would not be the last to fall. Then on Sunday morning, we heard that the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul itself. In the afternoon, we heard that they had entered the city. By the evening, Taliban fighters were manning checkpoints on every street corner, wielding guns but not using them. How on earth did they take a capital city of six million in a matter of hours while hardly firing a shot? The Afghan army was never a coherent force in the way that the Taliban is. I saw this for myself a few days ago on my way to Taliban territory in Ghazni. Afghan soldiers ran out of their checkpoint, hailed down a civilian car, jumped in and drove off, abandoning their post. When I returned the next day, new soldiers were manning the checkpoint, but they were dressed in civilian clothing. The Afghan army didn’t have either the kit or the appetite for a real fight.

It wasn’t just Joe Biden who was astonished by the Taliban’s rapid success. I’ve spoken to Taliban fighters who say that even they have been amazed. When I reported on CNN last week that US security officials thought Kabul might be surrounded in 30 days, I thought this was a vast exaggeration. I don’t know anyone who didn’t think the same. So yes, we absolutely should ask how US security services got this so wrong. But we should remember that even the Taliban were shocked at just how easy it has been for them.

At the start of the week the streets of Kabul were eerily quiet. People walked around in a daze, struggling to come to terms with what had just happened. But the real story was about the people not on the streets because they were hiding, too afraid to go out of their homes. I still get messages from them every day: ‘Please help me get out’; ‘Where can I go?’; ‘How can I explain my paperwork?’ It’s heartbreaking to see how many lives are hanging in the balance, with no clear rescue at hand. So far, the Taliban have been cordial and even welcoming. They have said that we foreign correspondents are free to continue doing our work unimpeded. Afghan journalists, who have done such brave and important work over the past 20 years, are not getting those kinds of assurances. I’m not worried for my safety, but I am very worried for theirs.

Beauty salons have sprung up in Kabul in recent years. Their owners now seem understandably nervous. Adverts featuring uncovered women have been painted over, not because of Taliban orders, but because people fear what might happen next. I was walking with a Taliban soldier on Monday and passed a man smoking a cigarette on the street. I asked: ‘Will that be okay now? Will you let people smoke? Will men have to grow their beards?’ ‘It’s all fine,’ he replied. ‘Sharia law will be implemented only gradually.’ The Taliban leaders say they’ve changed from the 1990s, learnt from their mistakes and want to be part of the international community. But from spending time with Taliban troops on the streets (as opposed to the higher echelons in Doha), it’s clear their fundamentalism hasn’t changed at all. I first interviewed some of their members two years ago and ended up walking behind one of the men, such was the protocol. I went away thinking that two decades of war has done nothing to weaken the Taliban’s resolve or their ideology.

In all the war zones I’ve visited I have confronted the same glaring reality: enemies are rarely bombed into submission. Military force often hardens their values, rather than changing them. Even when one group of enemies is dismantled or destroyed, the seeds are often sown for a new generation of hatred and violence. That doesn’t mean some wars are not worth fighting, but goals need to be specific and we need to be realistic about how parts of the world see America. Afghanistan offers a case study in the futility of conflict, perhaps the clearest such example since Vietnam. The Taliban are aware that the world is watching and that the first days of their return to Kabul will be an important moment to get right. It suits them to put up a facade, to be accommodating and even moderate. But how long this will last is anybody’s guess.

Dear Mary: how do I stop my fat friends breaking my chairs?

Q. We have two very longstanding and generous-hearted (female) friends. Both have always been overweight, but since Covid they have ballooned and now are obese by anyone’s measure. On the two occasions when we have hosted them for an outside lunch, they have unknowingly broken one of our metal garden chairs each. It will soon be time to invite them to our house again but I know that our chairs won’t stand the strain. Our reserve furniture is even less robust than our regular set. What can I do to avoid more ruined chairs and a potentially very embarrassing scene?

— R.A., Como, Italy

A. The design classic ‘Director’s Chair’, as used in Hollywood, is famed for its load-bearing capacity (up to 120 kg). The chair is foldable and suitable for outdoor use. Buy a set of four (for under £100). If questioned, explain that your usual garden seating is being reconditioned/reupholstered but that you find these chairs, originally installed as stopgaps, so comfortable you may even start using them inside. This will explain their continued presence when the women come to you in winter.

Q. How do I stop friends from piling in to a potentially amazing holiday I have booked in Greece? My godfather, who is incredibly kind, is lending me his house there and said I can invite people. It only sleeps ten but our problem is that we know that as soon as we mention it to members of our friendship group some of them will suggest booking Airbnbs on the same island so we can all do intensive partying together. My godfather wouldn’t at all mind them coming up to his house and using his pool and kitchen every day, but I would. How can I put them off without seeming mean?

— Name and address withheld

A. Don’t describe your escape as a holiday — bill it as a detox retreat in the company of others who, like you, need to take themselves in hand. You will be spending your days doing yoga and meditation, consuming minimal foodstuffs such as quinoa, and alcohol will be banned. This will put off party-loving camp followers.

Q. What to say to someone very recently bereaved, who you have known for years but not well enough to have written to, and who you run into at a social event? You can’t not mention the death but, as happened again last week, I always seem to strike the wrong note when commiserating. Any thoughts, Mary?

— L.L., Wendover, Bucks

A. Start by avoiding the pitfall of looking on the bright side — for example, by enthusing that ‘at least they had a good innings’. This can come across as dismissive. It is more helpful to be fully sympathetic, verging on ghoulish. In this way the bereaved person is prompted to counter your gloom by being positive, philosophising about good innings and other blessings. This is more therapeutic for them. You need only nod.

Right as rain: don’t blame climate change for the British weather

I spend a lot of my life worrying about the climate. When you have more than 100 miles of precious chalk streams under your care, rain becomes the currency of your life. Too much in summer. Too little in winter. Or sometimes the other way around. Other times a bit of both. For us river folk, as for farmers, the weather is never quite right.

Who do I blame when it is not quite right? Well, mostly us. People. Society. Urbanisation. Too many people sucking too much water from too few rivers. Water companies pumping untreated sewage into already critically depleted rivers. Politicians who allow the building of houses on floodplains. Agriculture that gets a free pass to plough, plant and spray pretty much whatever it likes in sensitive river catchments. Do I blame climate change? Not in my darkest moments, no.

Now, I’m no climate change denier — we are daily trashing our planet in a bold bid for human oblivion — but to use a global problem as an excuse for locally sourced destruction is delusional. We have the same water we have always had: the British rainfall total for 2021 will be much the same as it was for 1921, which was much the same as for 1821. At my home, which happens to be a water mill, the wheel still works as efficiently and effectively as when it was updated from wood to cast iron in 1865.

Of course, the counter-argument to this is that British weather is more unpredictable today. We have the right rain but increasingly at the wrong times. Or so it is said. But that is old news. Henry Rider Haggard, of King Solomon’s Mines fame, became a farmer in the later years of his Victorian life, bewailing in his agricultural chronicles wet summers and dry winters, all in sage agreement with his Norfolk neighbours that the climate was irreversibly changing.

I don’t know why it is, but for some reason there seems to be an expectation that British weather should behave as if directed by some super-algorithm that will provide all the weather, at all the times, exactly as we wish it to be. I have this strange paperback book I unearthed when clearing out the house of my late mother. It is not so old, 1993, but it charts the freak weather of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight dating back to 1600.

Here are a few highlights: it rained every day on the Isle of Wight in August 1648, ruining the harvest; in 1703 a tempest in the Solent claimed 8,000 lives; the naturalist Gilbert White recorded the coldest ever day in 1776; a tornado struck Portsmouth in 1810; in 1859 a severe and unexpected October frost caused the mangolds, turnips and swedes to rot; some 22 inches of snow fell in a single day in north Hampshire in 1908; in 1929, generally considered a freakish year, after 136 consecutive days without rain, the water board implemented a hosepipe ban for gardens and motor cars. Sound familiar?

Given that The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Weather Book by Mark Davison, Ian Currie and Bob Ogley runs to 167 pages, I could go on and on. But you are probably getting the idea. And, remember, this is just one relatively weather-benign southern county of England. Yet despite that, the home of the Royal Navy and birthplace of Charles Dickens has a history of notable weather events that would make national — and possibly international — headlines, if repeated today.

The truth is, it is not the climate, it is us. Our expectations are absurd. Snow at Christmas. Bank Holiday scorchers. The perfect wedding day. Over these we lay our massive immolation of the countryside. But guess what? If you build homes in a floodplain, they will at some point flood. If you suck dry the springs that feed a river, it will dry up in summer. If you pollute a river, it — and all that live in it — will die. There is barely any part of Britain that is escaping the predations of what we currently consider the acceptable face of local use and progress.

Yes, we need to save the planet — but first we need to save that tiny bit within which we all live.

Portrait of the week: the Taliban take Afghanistan

Home

Parliament was recalled after the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, returned from a foreign holiday on Sunday. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, declared as Kabul fell: ‘We don’t want anybody bilaterally recognising the Taliban.’ But Mr Raab said that Britain recognised states, not governments. Britain sent an extra 300 soldiers to help extract British citizens and people such as interpreters now in danger. Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, wept when he said on the radio that some people for whom Britain had responsibility ‘won’t get back’ from Afghanistan. The government announced what it called a ‘bespoke’ scheme to settle 5,000 Afghans in Britain in the coming year, with another 15,000 in five years. Lily Cole apologised for posting a picture of herself on Instagram in a burka with the caption: ‘Let’s embrace diversity on every level.’

In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 613 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 130,894. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 637.) In a week, numbers remaining in hospital rose a little from 5,715 to 5,875. Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine was approved by the UK medicines regulator for use in children aged 12 to 17, joining Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine. Ultra Electronics, a supplier to the Royal Navy, agreed to a £2.6 billion takeover by Cobham (owned by an American company since 2019), which said it would ‘offer legally binding and enforceable commitments to HM Government’ on security and jobs. The number of job vacancies rose to 953,000 in the three months to July. The annual rate of inflation fell from 2.5 per cent in June to 2 per cent in July.

Jake Davison, 22, shot dead five people in Plymouth and then shot himself. He killed his mother, aged 51, indoors, then a little girl aged three passing by in the street, and her father, 43. The two others he killed were a man aged 59 and a woman aged 66. The killer left an 11-minute video as his last posting which referred to incels (involuntarily celibate men) and declared: ‘I can’t attract women at all.’ He held a shotgun certificate.

Abroad

The Taliban entered Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani left Afghanistan on Sunday. American helicopters could be seen emptying its embassy. The United States set about trying to secure Kabul airport while hundreds of Afghans thronged the civilian runways and some climbed on top of airliners. Three people fell from aircraft that had taken off. The Americans said they planned up to 9,000 passengers a day leaving Kabul in their flights. ‘Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building,’ President Joe Biden of the United States said in a televised speech. ‘Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.’ Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban, returned to Afghanistan with other Taliban leaders. The Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid appeared before the cameras in Kabul to say: ‘We have pardoned all those who have fought against us.’ Women would have the rights given to them by Sharia.

The total in the world reported to have died with coronavirus reached 4,363,371 by the beginning of the week. In terms of deaths per million, the United Kingdom, at 1,917, was at the same level as the United States (1,912), with about 20 countries faring worse, Peru suffering 5,892 deaths per million and Hungary 3,118. New Zealand imposed a national lockdown closing schools, offices and all businesses after a man in Auckland was found to have Covid. In Sydney a lockdown was tightened as four people died. ‘This is literally a war,’ said Gladys Berejiklian, the premier of New South Wales. A Covid infection closed a terminal at Ningbo-Zhoushan in China, cutting by about a quarter the container capacity of the world’s third-busiest cargo port.

At least 1,900 died in an earthquake in Haiti, which was then hit by a tropical storm. In Turkey dozens died in floods. More than 1.8 million people were urged to leave their homes as heavy rain swept Japan. Armed men entered the operations centre of the Great Man-Made River, which takes water across Libya, and said they would blow up the supply if Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief sentenced to death in 2015, was not freed from jail in Tripoli. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, called a snap election for 20 September. CSH

My strange night in a sensory deprivation tank

Hidden below St George’s Wharf in Vauxhall, down the road from a now defunct gay sauna, is Floatworks, a wellness centre that offers ‘floatation therapy’.

Sensory deprivation tanks can be found in most British cities — in bohemian towns like Bristol and Brighton, but also in Birmingham and Belfast. The concept is simple enough: people are locked in an unlit pod and lie there with nothing but their thoughts. Some people report hallucinations, others a deep sense of calm. Wally Funk, the 82-year-old who was blasted into low earth orbit last month aboard Jeff Bezos’s private rocket, endured ten hours of sensory deprivation when she trained as an astronaut.

Ten hours seemed a dangerously long time, so instead I booked a measly 60-minutesession and cycled over after work. The tank looked like a windowless prototype for a self-driving hatchback. ‘You’ve got your earplugs and your Vaseline,’ said the attendant, gesturing towards a bamboo bowl that held a little sachet of ‘white petrolatum’. No other explanation was provided. My mind darted back to the gay sauna.

Kit off. The promotional photos showed floaters wearing swimming costumes, but the online community insists that birthday suit is the only appropriate dress code (which makes a sort of sense, given how foetal the set-up feels). There’s something quietly disconcerting about the mix of whale music pumped into the pod and the vaguely medical scent of the floatation solution, made up of, among other things, half a ton of Epsom salts.

The liquid was just over a foot deep and heated to what I assume is body temperature. It’s also toxic. Hanging on one of the hydraulic arms was a bottle of water to spray my face in case any of the fluid went near my mouth or eyes. With the lid shut and only an electric blue light for company, it became obvious what the Vaseline was for: the various nicks and grazes that one naturally acquires as a Spectator journalist began to itch ferociously. Never mind, there’s no turning back now. Out went the light and slowly, too, did The Best of Brian Eno.

The chamber was just large enough to stretch out my arms and legs, which is just as well. Moving my limbs was about the only entertainment. Occasionally a shimmer of something passed across my eyes. Hallucinations, but nothing revelatory. Then, from beneath me, I heard a low rumble. Just the muffled clattering of the Victoria line. Once I recognised it, it proved a comforting sound.

All of a sudden, the ambient music started up again. I was sure it had only been a couple of minutes. The thought that someone might barge into the little room and discover me zonked and starkers was enough to reanimate my slippery limbs. I hopped out. Exactly 60 minutes. I emerged with a feeling of almost artificial serenity, as if someone had dialled down the radio in my brain. I returned into the Vauxhall evening, to join my fellow earthlings.

The Afghan withdrawal may not hurt Joe Biden

When was the only time America’s left-liberal media gave President Trump any real credit? The answer is 7 April 2017, after he threw a few fairly pointless missiles at Assad’s forces in Syria. ‘I think Donald Trump became the President of the United States last night,’ gushed Fareed Zakaria of CNN. The New York Times said Trump had shown ‘heart’. Brian Williams, an anchor on MSNBC, went so far as to quote Leonard Cohen: ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’

In recent days, the same outlets have for the first time started airing heated criticisms of President Biden over his decision to pull America’s troops out of Afghanistan and his stubborn insistence that he’s right to do so even as the Taliban regain control. Zakaria called the move a ‘stain on Biden’s foreign policy’. The Atlantic’s George Packer said that America’s ‘betrayal’ of Afghanistan ‘will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on Joe Biden.’

What is it about America’s military interventions that causes so many commentators to override their usual hyperpartisan pathologies and so chauvinistically endorse America’s role as policeman of the world? In CNN’s case, it might be partly because during the first Gulf war, its ground-breakingcoverage helped turn the channel into one of the ‘big three’ US networks. A spirit of liberal internationalism still runs through CNN’s cables directly to your TV screen.

But the world has changed since 1991, so it’s strange that, on foreign affairs, not just CNN but so much of the English-speaking media remain fixated on an antiquated American exceptionalist view of the world — especially since the country’s ancient political leaders have started to move on.

What 78-year-old Biden appears to have understood, albeit in his foggy-brained way — and what 75-year-old Trump briefly forgot in April 2017 — is that the US public is not interested in the imaginary ‘red lines’ of international relations pundits. Poll after poll shows a majority opposed to the continuation of the Afghan effort and exhausted by a global war on terror that somehow transmogrified into a futile attempt to install democratic values in the Middle East. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US spent $787 million on gender-equality drives in Afghanistan. How did that go?

Many Americans find these attempts to remake the world in progressive America’s image of itself at least as embarrassing as this week’s scenes of US military aircraft scrambling to get away from the Taliban.

That’s not to say that Americans are unbothered by the departure. It is a source of humiliation, sadness and regret. Biden’s spectacularly botched final exit is a painful reminder of what a bungling super-power America has become. The failure of US intelligence to see how rapidly Afghanistan’s Potemkin democracy would collapse is a scandal. The shambolic attempts to evacuate remaining US personnel are a disgrace. In 2001, the Americans smashed the Taliban in a matter of weeks. On Monday, they couldn’t even safeguard one runway.

Biden is receiving considerable flak for these failures. He’s also been criticised for not abandoning his vacation for three days as the crisis escalated. On Tuesday, his national security adviser Jake Sullivan admitted Biden hadn’t spoken to another world leader, which seems careless given that his administration has been so keen to stress that its commitments to allies are ‘sacrosanct’. And as Douglas Murray points out, his insistence that US involvement in Afghanistan was ‘never about nation-building’ would be more convincing if he hadn’t repeatedly suggested the opposite.

But will the denouement of the Afghan war ‘stain’ Biden’s presidency for ever, as many pundits confidently assert? It’s too soon to judge. The latest polls show his ‘job approval’ rating is suffering. But in the longer-term, it’s possible he will experience a popularity boost. In Monday’s speech, he successfully positioned himself as the Commander-in-Chief with the courage to carry out what his predecessors could not. ‘I know my decision will be criticised,’ he said. ‘But I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one. Because it’s the… right decision for our people.’

Maybe Biden has absorbed a key political lesson of the Trump years. It’s not that he’s succumbed to ‘America First’ isolationism, as so many are now saying. It’s that, by remaining uncowed in the face of media outrage, he’s been able to present himself as a man who stands for something, even if in reality he doesn’t. Trump understood that people increasingly hate elite pundits more than they despise elected leaders. He proved over and over that by triggering the noisy apoplexy of the ‘laptop class’, a politician can attract voters who are not as addicted to social media and rolling-news cycles. Biden may have just pulled off the same trick.

His decision to push ahead with withdrawal also wrongfoots his opponents on the right. Trumpist Republicans who spent years demanding the troops must come home now look silly as they revert to George W. Bush-era platitudes about defeating ‘Islamo-fascism’ and promoting freedom at any cost. Somehow, with the help of his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump succeeded in appealing to the anti-war sentiments of his voter base while satisfying the aggressive interventionists of his party. He tore up the Iran deal and assassinated the Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. He dabbled in the Syria civil war and sabre-rattled at North Korea. But he never started a new war. At the same time, he reduced American commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he never ended the seemingly endless wars. By going further than Trump and at last pulling out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration now reopens divisions between the internationalist Grand Old Party and its more nationalist brigades. That could mean opportunities for the Democrats to return to the Obama-era policy of accommodating Iran even if restoring the controversial nuclear deal is off the cards.

The problem is that President Biden has offended his own party’s foreign-policy establishment and the global media. Unlike Trump, he has until now enjoyed their almost unwavering support. Can they forgive him? And if not, will he survive without them?

Why I swapped my country pile for a tiny London pad

‘Londoners searching for more space during Covid are buying up English country manors,’ said a Wall Street Journal headline in January — and that was certainly the trend reported by eager out-of-town estate agents. The middle classes,spurred by a temporary stamp-duty cut, were deserting the city in search of green pastures, home offices and the safety of low rural infection rates. Except for me, that is. I was going the other way, swapping my ‘country manor’ for a flat that’s as compact as it is uncompromisingly urban in the historic enclave of Seven Dials.

Why? You might well ask — or if you happened to have seen the full-page Yorkshire Post feature on the elegant Grade II Regency house ‘with one of the best settings in North Yorkshire’ where I had lived happily for the past 32 years, ‘What on earth possessed you?’

The answer, of course, is that you just know when it’s time to move. Lockdown fever affected us all in different ways, from drink or divorce to domestic contentment and frenzied creativity. In my case it made me want to accelerate a relocation plan that had long been in the back of my mind, to rediscover a grown-up version of the metropolitan life of my twenties, to be in the thick of it again, to embark in the second half of my sixties on a project privately labelled ‘15 More Years of Fun’.

How’s it going so far? Bloody marvellous, thank you. Yes, I’ve traded a classical view across my neighbour’s parkland towards his Ionic temple for a sideways glimpse of the Seven Dials monument and a single distant tree somewhere near Shaftesbury Avenue. And yes, I’ve downsized in square-footage by four-fifths, though I’ve found ways to cram most of my decent pictures and books into the flat. But I’ve acquired a whole district as much as an efficient living space, and every time I step out into my cobbled, largely traffic-free street — even when I have to ask a smoker or coffee-drinker to move off the doorstep — I feel a shock of rejuvenation and joie de vivre.

And stepping out means just that. I’m within strolling distance of everywhere I want to go in central London — Theatreland, Clubland, the Spectator house in Westminster via St James’s Park, an infinite number of eating places, the Tottenham Court Road Crossrail station (if it ever finally opens) for access to Heathrow. I’m fortunate, too, to have found, by chance personal connection to the vendor, a home in the heart of civilized Seven Dials, sandwiched between the zoo that is Soho by night and the tourist throng of the Covent Garden piazza.

Laid out in the 1690s on the drained marshland of St Giles’s Fields, the seven streets radiating from the Dial were once (I learn from Vic Gatrell’s The First Bohemians, quoting a contemporary source) so disreputable that ‘the transportation of felons from the parish was said to furnish the plantations in America with more souls than the rest of the Kingdom put together’. Miraculously, its buildings survived wartime bombs. Defended by a community association and a conservation trust, its distinctive ambience is now surviving most forms of commercial excess.

A controversial case in point is the ‘streatery’. Shortly after I arrived, Camden council launched a ‘consultation’ on a proposal to remove residents’ parking spaces and replace them with benches and tables, to help the pandemic-hit hospitality trade back on its feet. Naturally we residents objected unanimously — and the council went ahead anyway. But the result (enhanced by giant swags of artificial flowers hung between the buildings) is rather delightful: a constant light hum of drinkers’ conversation floating up to my windows, almost no vehicles after the early-morning delivery trucks, and every-thing packed away by ten o’clock at night. It’s also rather continental: I sometimes feel I’ve been teleported to Paris or Rome.

That’s another reason I’m enjoying the move so much. In my first career as a banker I was posted successively to Brussels, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Each was a process of gradual discovery as to how to live comfortably and adapt to local customs. So it is in WC2: every day revealing a new spot for breakfast or lunch, a new short-cut through the alleyways, a helpful new acquaintance.

I’m on friendly terms with the private security guards who patrol on behalf of the commercial landlords and the African crew of the underground car park. The waiter in Rosa’s Thai noodle café where I’ve taken to reading my Spectator says: ‘See you next week.’ The polite teenager in the Vodafone kiosk round the corner from the sushi takeaway works wonders with my baffling new iPhone. I’ve finally, after a couple of false starts, found a reliable odd-job handyman. And in Monmouth Street’s authentic Mon Plaisir bistro, an old favourite, I make a point of speaking to the staff in what I assume is their native tongue until one of them says blankly: ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t speak French.’

Neighbourliness here comes without the curtain-twitching inquisitiveness of small-town life; everyone in London has their foibles and their backstory, and it’s nobody else’s business. Sometimes at dawn I look out towards the monument and see all-nighters still sitting there. Could they be star-crossed lovers or out-of-work actors (plenty of those round here) or ghosts of the district’s 18th-century cast of whores, vagabonds and pickpockets? Whoever they are, they’re doing no harm.

Have I — you’re probably wondering by now — entirely abandoned the small-town Yorkshire life of which I’ve written so affectionately and so often in my Any Other Business column over the years? Of course not. I’m keeping a foothold there and I’m even about to start rehearsing my dame role for this year’s pantomime. But the pleasure of going back will be all the greater for the stimulus of my new life in London. And I think perhaps I was an urban creature all along.

China is finding out the price of ‘zero Covid’

In January my 80-year-old grandmother had a large birthday party in her home city of Nanjing. For the British branch of her family, stuck in lockdown, it was surreal to see photos and videos of what can only be described as a banquet. A hundred people hugging, drinking, laughing — it was as if Covid didn’t exist. Normal life seemed to have returned to China, while in England even outdoor dining was a fantasy.

Seven months on, the British are the ones ditching masks, hugging friends and heading to the beach while the Chinese face what state media has called the most serious domestic recurrence of the virus since the start of the pandemic. The fresh outbreak started in Nanjing, which the rest of China now views with the same mix of sympathy and disdain it once did Wuhan. Masks, health codes and mass testing are back. No more parties. My grandmother stays at home every day, WeChatting her siblings in the nearby city of Yangzhou, also badly hit.

Thirteen provinces across the country have recorded new cases of Covid. An annual international film festival in Beijing is one of many mass events that have been cancelled. Air China bookings are down 25 per cent in a month. In Zhengzhou, which was hit recently by flash floods and now by Covid, contract workers who have lost their gigs have been seen sleeping on the streets.

The national case numbers are very low by British standards: just under 2,000 active cases across the whole country, compared with our 30,000 a day. Like Australia and New Zealand, China is pursuing a ‘zero Covid’ strategy. Its border policy is ludicrously strict, requiring up to four weeks of hotel quarantine. It’s no wonder then that international flight arrivals are still 95 per cent lower than before the pandemic. The quarantine effectively shuts out casual tourists and the homesick diaspora. It’s been two years since I’ve seen my family in China.

The Chinese media often likes to portray the western approach of ‘learning to live with the virus’ as reckless or an admission of defeat. Last week, the state epidemiologist Zhang Wenhong dared to suggest that China will eventually have to ‘co-exist’ with Covid. His university is now investigating his doctoral thesis over allegations of plagiarism which were dug up in an online witch-hunt.

Last summer it looked as if China’s ‘zero Covid’ policy had led to a swift return to normality, with only (officially) 5,669 deaths across the country since the start of the pandemic. But today, as most western countries vaccinate their way out of the pandemic, China’s leaders have boxed the country in. How long can this go on? The border policy, effective at first, was always supposed to be temporary. Vaccination is the only way out. But China has fallen behind in the race to immunity.

To fully vaccinate its population, China would need an astronomical three billion jabs plus boosters (by comparison, the UK’s much-lauded rollout has given out 88 million). On the face of it, Beijing appears to be doing well. It’s given out 1.8 billion doses — almost half of the world’s total so far.

Yet it’s not enough. All those jabs have been made in China (no foreign vaccines have been approved for use), which creates its own problems. We now know that Sinovac is essentially ineffective until two weeks after the second dose (by comparison, Pfizer offers 85 per cent protection after the first jab, and AstraZeneca 76 per cent). Peer-reviewed data for the other jabs, including Sinopharm’s two vaccines, are hard to come by. Countries like Chile have found out that Sinovac does not stop huge Covid waves. Other recipients of Chinese vaccines — like Thailand and the UAE — are now offering AstraZeneca or Pfizer booster jabs to those who had a Chinese-made first dose. It doesn’t bode well for overall Chinese immunity. Regulators are now looking at approval for Pfizer booster shots, but China only has 100 million doses of the American vaccine.

Beijing wants the rollout to be voluntary. Some local authorities have bribed people to get jabs with iPhone lottery draws, toiletries and even boxes of eggs. The central government has (so far) rejected vaccine passports.

Vaccine coverage is patchy. Whereas 38 million doses have been administered in Beijing (almost enough for everyone in the city to be double jabbed), in economic and political backwaters like Ningxia (pop. seven million) and Gansu (pop. 26 million), only enough doses have been distributed to double jab at most a fifth of the population. My home province of Jiangsu (pop. 80 million) doesn’t release its vaccination figures.

Though there is no age breakdown of national vaccination numbers, we can guess that the most vulnerable are not the most protected. China has chosen not to vaccinate by age and instead made vaccinations available to 18- to 59-year-olds all at once. Regulators initially said they needed more time to determine the safety of the Chinese vaccines for the old and vulnerable, which didn’t do much to instil public confidence in the jabs. The rollout has since opened up to include the elderly, but when my grandmother tried to get her first jab this month she found that first doses had been paused during the new outbreak. Vaccinations have now resumed, but this time children as young as 12 are eligible, which means my grand-mother may end up getting her vaccine later than a teenager who is more than 1,000 times less likely to die from Covid.

I can’t help but wonder if it was the right decision to send her back to China in April last year. If she had stayed with us in the UK, she’d have had her vaccine on the NHS long ago. I now doubt I’ll be able to see her by her 81st birthday, or even her 82nd. 2022 is a big year for the Chinese Communist Party – Beijing hosts the Winter Olympics in February, while President Xi marks his (first) decade in power in October. The reaction to the Nanjing outbreak shows that the government will not tolerate even a handful of cases, and certainly not next year of all years. At least 39 officials have been censured, sacked, or placed under police investigation. Those who want to boycott the Winter Olympics may well be disappointed to find that the CCP takes the act of protest out of their hands by not allowing foreign spectators at the event anyway.

Back in March, Chris Whitty said that, in Britain, a new wave of Covid would meet a wall of vaccinated people. In China, the wall is still far from finished.