Is Serena Williams’s fame as a cultural icon eclipsing her tennis?

Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but one of her shots is an exception. Her serve is not only one of the most destructive strokes in tennis, it’s also one of the most beguilingly beautiful. Her action begins slowly, even ponderously — as if her limbs are reluctant to emerge from stillness. But from this heaviness comes a sudden gathering, an explosive acceleration, as racket, arm, trunk and legs are flung up in unison towards the ball. Gerald Marzorati devotes a couple of pages to Williams’s serve in Seeing Serena, and he points out something I’d never noticed, which is how ‘effortlessly smooth’ her ball toss is. No one, he writes, not even Federer, has ever used their non-dominant arm so efficiently on serve.

Marzorati knows his tennis well, and is good at observing such things — nuances of style and technique that often get overlooked. Watching Williams partner Andy Murray in a mixed doubles at Wimbledon, he notes that her ability to hit low volleys on the move has always been (and remains) ‘a challenge’. He also writes well about her service return, and the terror it must inspire in opponents. Just imagine the stress of knowing that if one of your hardest serves is fractionally misplaced, it is likely to be dispatched for a screaming winner. As someone whose serve rarely goes where intended, I can imagine that feeling only too well.

Marzorati got the idea for his book in the wake of the 2018 US Open final, scene of that torrid argument between Williams and the chair umpire Carlos Ramos, during which she accused him of ‘stealing’ a game from her, and later suggested that he’d been sexist. So much heat did the incident generate that it got Marzorati thinking about how Williams had become much more than simply a tennis player. These days, he observed, she was also a social media influencer, a fashion icon, a ‘working mom with a baby’ — and, of course, a ‘striving’ black woman who’d ‘forged a commanding presence in one white realm after another’. To better understand these roles, he decided to follow Williams for the 2019 tennis season, watching her matches, attending her press conferences and speaking with people — both from inside and outside the world of tennis — who could shed light on what she represented.

The book has a free-flowing, essayistic structure, which allows Marzorati to wander across many topics, some only tenuously related to Williams. There are a few arresting moments which have nothing much to do with her at all. An interview with Chris Evert leads to a discussion of the challenges of playing on clay courts. The arrival of Wimbledon prompts a micro-essay on the significance of lawns in English tradition.

There is also an interesting passage explaining why top men beat top women so easily — something that a teenage Williams helped demonstrate in 1996, when she accepted a challenge to play Karsten Braasch, a German player ranked around 200 in the world, and got thrashed 6-1. People generally assume that men’s advantage over women is that they hit the ball much harder. Not so, Marzorati says: the differences in shot velocity are actually small. What really favours men is that they are far quicker around the court than women, especially when running from side to side — something that probably stems from their hips being slimmer.

Marzorati, as I’ve said, is a good commentator on tennis, but his book suffers a dip when he analyses Williams as a cultural icon. Here he is hampered by a reverential tone that ‘may or may not’ (a favourite formulation) be related to his former job as the editor of New York Times Magazine. He does seem terribly impressed by Williams’s ascension into a sphere of celebrity that makes it natural for her wedding guests to include ‘her friends Kim Kardashian and Eva Longoria, Beyonce and Jay-Z’. We learn that Williams walked down the aisle at this wedding (to the ‘tech-world influencer’ Alexis Ohanian, incidentally) in a dress designed by Sarah Burton, who had also designed the Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding dress — a fact that, Marzorati cryptically adds, ‘Williams may or may not have considered. ‘

Diction, too, can be a problem. Up-and-coming players are always ‘phenoms’ (as in the ‘young Japanese phenom Naomi Osaka’). All sorts of people have ‘cultural moments’. Williams herself triggered one in 2018, when she wrote some fairly standard things on Instagram about the difficulties of combining tennis and motherhood. Forging this narrative, of ‘being a struggling working mum’, was apparently as ‘galvanic as anything she’d ever done’. But then it’s hardly surprising that it made such an impact, because Marzorati has by this point already informed us that

Williams entered her thirties at a time when being black and female, especially if immixed with wealth or stardom (or both), began to make for an especially galvanising admixture.

I’m struggling to describe (let alone understand) this sentence, but I’m pretty sure it’s the opposite of galvanic.

It’s not, of course, that there is nothing to say about Williams’s cultural influence, or the racism she and her sister Venus have encountered throughout their careers (crowds cheering whenever they were losing; the sniffiness of opponents and officials). When Marzorati analyses specific instances of prejudice, he is invariably sensible and illuminating. But as a cultural critic — which he clearly aspires to be — he is let down by being too obviously invested in, too accepting of, the culture that he is analysing. Bar the inevitable ills of racism and sexism, he doesn’t really criticise anything. Strip away the effortful theorising (references to Sontag, Claudia Rankine, etc), and large parts of this book end up being a bland celebration of little more than the fact that Williams has 13 million Instagram followers, that she started her own line in athleisure wear and that when she retires she may forge a path similar to that of the ‘Barbados-born pop singer turned global taste arbiter and lifestyle entrepreneur, Rihanna’. For now, I’ll stick to watching her play tennis.

Life’s a bitch: Animal, by Lisa Taddeo, reviewed

Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the sexual hang-ups of three ordinary women. It took eight years to research and write. It didn’t seem worth it.

Luckily, she was also gathering material for a novel, Animal, a book teeming with the rage, frustration and drama so lacking in the debut. The same motifs and ideas —mothers, desire, shame — appear, but with a story that twists and turns.

Animal is the first-person account of Joan, a slightly unhinged 37-year-old woman: ‘I am depraved. I hope you like me.’ She leaves New York after her former lover shoots himself in the face in a restaurant while she’s on a date with another man. This event does not so much upset her as prompt her to go cross country and seek out Alice, a beautiful, mysterious yoga teacher in Los Angeles. Only gradually does it become clear why Joan is how she is, and why she is so obsessed with this younger woman. The threads of suspense are expertly woven as the story shuttles between past and present. But will it unravel?

While the subjects of Three Women came across as a little pathetic, our anti-heroine is ready to steal, cheat, kill and joke. Post #MeToo, women are out for revenge: ‘The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.’ Like her character, Taddeo lets loose without emotional or stylistic restraint. Even if some lines don’t quite land, enough of Joan’s wisecracks hit the spot, particularly when it comes to sexual politics: ‘The older the man, the more my speciality. I knew that when I met God one day it would go well.’

The book is an ode to LA both past and present. The protagonist’s name is a nod to the Californian writer Joan Didion. There’s modern-day satire (‘Every time we spoke, I pictured her at an outdoor table in the sun, nibbling gravlax’) and over-the-top characters straight out of Raymond Chandler or Billy Wilder. Lennie, Joan’s sad, lecherous landlord, drifts off into nostalgic reveries of 1970s sex parties, the same described by the journalist Guy Talese in his book Thy Neighbour’s Wife, the account of America’s sexual mores which inspired Three Women. But while Taddeo’s non-fiction felt super-ficial, this fantasy version somehow feels real.

Britain should resist copying the EU’s corporate responsibility law

Big corporations have a lot not to be proud of, and we certainly could do with laws to rein in some of their excesses. But that doesn’t mean that we should necessarily nod those laws through without a careful look. 

A case in point is the demand made in recent days for the government to follow an EU initiative and introduce a ‘corporate responsibility’ law. This would require British companies to vet their entire supply chains for, among other things, human rights violations.

The EU scheme in question, based on a European parliament vote in March, is what you have to look at to see just what is being asked for. Its demands are both interesting and, shall we say, not modest.

Large or publicly-listed undertakings must, under the Euro-proposal, be required by law to show ‘due diligence’ to prevent their activities contributing to adverse impacts on human rights anywhere in their supply chain throughout the world. This includes impacts created not only by those they deal with directly, but also by organisations those people buy from, and so on. 

If they do not do this corporations are to be landed with ‘effective, proportionate and dissuasive’ (i.e. swingeing) fines, plus the possibility of lawsuits in their home jurisdictions even where the practices they contributed to were entirely lawful where they occurred. There would also be legal obligations to publicise steps taken to remediate problems, for example by paying money or making a public apology, and to negotiate with trade unions and ‘stakeholders’ – a term including, among others, ‘citizens’ associations’ and ‘civil society organisations’ (polite Euro-speak for approved pressure groups).

It is true that many responsible multinationals already do at least some of these things: apart from anything else, their reputation depends on it. We should nevertheless be cautious about legislation of this sort.

For one thing, it involves diverting managers from doing what they are good at – developing the business – to something they are neither trained nor well-placed to do: namely, acting as global human rights policemen in countries half-way across the globe. We may live in a welfare state, but we do not live in a welfare world: and any initiative under which the law requires UK companies to embrace inefficiency and uncompetitiveness of this kind needs looking at sceptically.

For another, we need to worry about the forced politicisation of business. True, much of the corporate West is already falling over itself to embrace political wokery as a kind of PR gig; but at least it is doing so by choice, and sensible companies can opt out. By requiring multinationals to take steps to mitigate threats to human rights emanating from third parties abroad, these proposals amount to ordering them to take a political stance in foreign countries, and probably an unpopular one at that. 

We would rightly be outraged if, say, Huawei said it would only deal with businesses in the UK that undertook to suppress what it saw as unfair criticism of the Chinese Communist party, or gave universities money on the understanding that they told researchers not to look too hard at events in Xinjiang. 

We should equally not contemplate mandating UK multinationals to lecture organisations in, say, the Philippines or Brazil on their duties to recognise trade unions or respect European equality norms.

What’s more, it’s all very well for the law to demand that a multinational closely supervise all companies abroad from whom it buys, whether directly or not, and ensure they stay in line on human rights. But suppose they don’t, perhaps for the understandable reason that they cannot afford to be uncompetitive. What then? Must the multinational withdraw its custom? 

If it does, it will either bankrupt that supplier, something unlikely to benefit their workers, or more likely make them deal with other, less scrupulous, buyers. Demands from (say) Chinese or Malaysian mega-corporations may take many forms; but decent treatment of workers is unlikely to feature very high.

In fact, one suspects that those backing these proposals, including a body called the corporate justice coalition, may not be too worried about such matters anyway. 

Although the coalition calls for corporate responsibility legislation in the language of the enlightened European governing class, the coalition is actually an umbrella group covering organisations that are hardly falling over themselves to support capitalism. They include, for example, Amnesty, Oxfam, Share Action, Tax Justice, 38 Degrees, Global Justice Now, and other bodies that help make London the world centre for radical pressure groups. 

Whatever its effect on events abroad, a corporate responsibility law would be a godsend to these organisations whenever they felt like making life difficult for businessmen and women in London boardrooms. They could be able, with legal backing, to strong arm directors into negotiating with them as ‘civil society organisations’; and by presenting dossiers of alleged human rights abuses. they could force them to exercise ‘due diligence’ in investigating them. They could also weigh companies down by demanding ream after ream of information about their activities and suppliers.

If this doesn’t work, there is always litigation. London multinationals already face occasional lawsuits for human rights violations allegedly caused abroad (sometimes brought by Leigh Day, which – you guessed it – is a member of the coalition). But until now, companies have been fairly successful in seeing off such claims (something made easier by Brexit, which got rid of a technical EU legal rule allowing a company based in London to be sued here however appropriate it might be for the litigation to take place somewhere else, such as where the events had actually happened). An open invitation to come to London to fight human rights cases and air grievances from all over the world would, one suspects, suit the members of the coalition just fine.

In short, corporate responsibility laws like this may not do much good for oppressed foreigners. They may even drive the odd UK multinational out of business or cause it to relocate elsewhere. But for those who dislike multinationals and global capitalism anyway, this probably doesn’t matter much: indeed, it can actually be chalked up as a victory.

There’s a moral here. Before you support attractive-looking proposals for new laws, it’s wise to do as good lawyers do: read the small print.

Don’t ‘Kill the Bill’

Are the rights of protesters and the rights of all other citizens fairly balanced? Think back to the Extinction Rebellion protests of April 2019, when climate activists chose to ‘peacefully occupy the centres of power and shut them down’, as they put it, including the heart of London.

The protests, organised globally, were perhaps the most disruptive in history. A small number of people managed to stop hundreds of thousands more going about their daily lives. People could not get to work, see family and friends or go shopping, because the streets were blocked by an extensive series of roadblocks and other tactics. At one point, printing presses were blockaded, undermining the free press. There was a huge economic hit to the capital, as transport hubs were closed and commuting became almost impossible.

As a former senior officer in the Metropolitan Police, I felt for my former colleagues as they struggled to contain the chaos. The protestors were well organised and ingeniously disruptive. They climbed on to bamboo towers several metres above the road surface, making it very difficult to remove them without risking their safety. They attached themselves to buildings. Dozens would ‘go floppy’ in the middle of the road at the same time, making it difficult to arrest and carry them away. What is more, they were highly agile. Remove one group and end a five-mile tailback and the call would go out on social media. Replacements would soon arrive.

What were police to do? Was the legislation clear enough about their powers? And is it clear enough two years later when, for example, a one-man protest with an amplifier can stop hundreds of civil servants from getting on with their jobs in the heart of Whitehall? The Government thinks not, which is why the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is currently making its way through Parliament.

To me, despite the ‘Kill the Bill’ protests and challenges from civil liberties groups, the Bill contains welcome new measures. We must always be on guard against new laws that might limit our ability to assemble and peacefully protest; the right to continue doing so is vital to democracy (and enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, though it predates that in English law by centuries). However, as John Larkin, makes clear in a new paper for Policy Exchange, this Bill is certainly not some instrument of repression as its opponents suggest.

What it does do is recognise that the methods of protest are evolving and therefore so must policing tactics in response – and the legislation that backs them up. The Bill, for instance, will add a clause making ‘noise which may result in serious disruption to an organisation in the vicinity’ unlawful, if it causes serious unease in the affected party.

This has caused alarm among campaigners, but they overlook the good reasons, which Larkin makes clear, why in practice these clauses are likely to be interpreted compatibly with the ECHR and existing law. Protesters will not be silenced because of what they are saying but how they are going about it – we may see fewer Glastonbury Festival-style stages on Parliament Square, with a few hundred people causing severe disruption to thousands in the vicinity.

Similarly, there are complaints about the legislation giving greater scope to prosecute protesters for damage to property, serious annoyance or serious inconvenience – which could, in theory, lead to maximum sentences of ten years in prison. Once again, however, this overlooks existing legislation that would temper the application of severe sentencing.

As robust debate on this and other measures in the Bill continues, and MPs test ministers on this new legislation in Parliament, two principles should be upheld. The ability to assemble and protest peacefully must be protected as a fundamentally important right. The Bill achieves this. 

Secondly, significantly more protection must be given to the rights of all other citizens to go about their daily lives without suffering disproportionate and severe levels of disruption. Protesters will often believe wholeheartedly that this disruption is justified for their particular cause; ultimately, the law must correct this misapprehension, for the benefit of us all.

Watch: Labour’s Naz Shah hints at blasphemy law

It was just three weeks ago that Steerpike pointed out that Labour MP Naz Shah was being billed to speak at a charity fundraiser alongside a controversial imam. Now it seems the shadow minister for community cohesion has caused yet further headaches for her leader thanks to her speech on Monday on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. 

Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.

This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008.  Shah told the Commons:

As a Muslim, for me and millions of Muslims across this country and a quarter of the world’s population who are Muslim too, with each day and each breath there is not a single thing in the world that we commemorate and honour more than our beloved Prophet, Mohammed, peace be upon him. But when bigots and racists defame, slander or abuse our Prophet, peace be upon him, just like some people do the likes of Churchill, the emotional harm caused upon our hearts is unbearable, because for 2 billion Muslims, he is the leader we commemorate in our hearts and honour in our lives, and he forms the basis of our identity and our very existence.

Shah continued to quote the words of playwright George Bernard Shaw in praise of the Prophet before closing with the following:

To those who say it is just a cartoon, I will not say, ‘It’s only a statue’, because I understand the strength of British feeling when it comes to our history, our culture and our identity. It is not just a cartoon and they are not just statues. They represent, symbolise and mean so much more to us as human beings. In conclusion, while this law would now protect civil order and emotional harm when it comes to secular and political figures such as Oliver Cromwell and Churchill and does not necessarily put other figures that many people in modern Britain hold close to their hearts, such as Jesus, the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, Moses, Ram, Buddha, Guru Nanak and many others, it does show that we recognise that there is such a thing as emotional harm. Finally, we must ask ourselves: when striking the careful balance to protect such emotional harms, can there and should there be a hierarchy of sentiments?

Mr S looks forward to Shah’s front bench colleagues justifying this stance next time they’re out doing the morning media round.

The shooting of a journalist – and the dark world of Dutch organised crime

In an attack that has rocked the Netherlands, a leading Dutch crime reporter is fighting for his life in hospital after being shot in broad daylight.

Last night, at around 7.30 p.m., the investigative crime journalist Peter R De Vries was shot five times on a busy street in central Amsterdam after leaving a television studio where he was recording a talk-show.

The horror on the face of the Amsterdam mayor was visible at a hastily-organised 11 p.m. press conference to discuss the attack, while tributes for De Vries flooded in from everyone from Dutch king Willem-Alexander to caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Rutte called the shooting ‘an attack on the freedom of the press… appalling for our democracy, justice system and society’. And Ferd Grapperhaus, caretaker justice minister, condemned the many-headed monster of organised crime which he said was ‘becoming ever more violent and unscrupulous’.

After the attack police sprang into action and with the help of video footage from bystanders arrested a 35-year-old Polish man living in Gelderland and a 21-year-old from Rotterdam after a highway chase.

De Vries is a journalist with a high public profile who is known for his work exposing mobsters and reviving cold cases. Some have already linked the attempted hit to a high-profile murder and drug trafficking trial involving Ridouan Taghi, described by the Dubai Police chief as ‘one of the world’s most dangerous and wanted men’ when he was arrested there in 2019.

De Vries had been acting as an adviser to Nabil B, a witness in the heavily-secured trial against Taghi and 16 other men, who are accused of ordering several assassinations as part of a drug war between Dutch gangs – known as the ‘Mocro mafia’ because of their Moroccan and Dutch Caribbean heritage. Taghi denies all the charges.

Nabil B’s own brother was shot dead by a hitman in 2018 and his former lawyer was mowed down on his doorstep in Amsterdam in 2019. De Vries himself has regularly received death threats from the Netherlands’ most notorious criminals, including from Willem Holleeder, the man who kidnapped the drinks magnate Freddy Heineken in 1983. In 2019, Taghi denied reports that he had threatened to have De Vries killed.

Now De Vries’ shooting has raised wider questions about the state of the ‘rule of law’ in the Netherlands, which appears to be an excellent place for criminals to conduct business. There are regular drug busts of huge quantities of hard drugs in and around Rotterdam harbour, Europe’s largest sea port, and some say that international criminals have flocked to the Netherlands because of its moderate justice system, which prefers lighter punishments and rehabilitation to jail sentences.

The Dutch police union has raised concerns in the past that the country has ‘the characteristics of a narco-state’. Two years ago a report into drug-related criminal activity in Amsterdam described the situation as ‘out of control’ – although murders and manslaughters were at a 20-year low in 2019.

One of the report’s authors, Pieter Tops, told DutchNews.nl last year that ‘all the characteristics and features of our country that make it attractive for legal economic investment also make it attractive for illegal investment. We have strong infrastructure, not just our roads and ports, but our financial and digital infrastructure too.’

He also argued that the Dutch justice system was enticing criminals. ‘Our penal system. It is meant to counter criminals but, in this country, it attracts them. A 2018 study showed the Netherlands to have the lowest sentences for drugs offences. Some criminals we’ve spoken to say this is a major attraction, often without us asking.’

Some experts worry that the de facto legalisation of cannabis leads young men into criminality as well. ‘Coffeeshops’, where cannabis is sold and smoked, trade legally but the state turns a blind eye to the fact that they are supplied by illegal cannabis cultivation. This ‘grey area’ effectively encourages organised crime, according to the current Amsterdam mayor, Femke Halsema.

This morning, back on the Lange Leidsedwarsstraat where De Vries was attacked, local residents and camera crews were gathering around bunches of flowers, notes of support and burning candles. One can only hope that action is now taken to stamp out organised crime in the Netherlands. De Vries would be the first to say: ‘doing nothing is not an option’.

The Building Safety Bill betrays the victims of the cladding scandal

Monday promised to be a significant day for those living in high rises across England.

The Building Safety Bill, which has been sold by the government as the biggest change to building safety in a generation, was published in its final form before it goes through parliament.

Introduced more than four years after the Grenfell fire killed 72 people, the Bill is aimed at ensuring a similar catastrophe never happens again. But will it succeed?

The 208-page document includes wide-ranging measures that will overhaul building safety regulation exposed as wholly inadequate by Grenfell, as well as significantly change the way in which high-rise buildings are designed, built, managed and lived in.

New dutyholders will be required at each stage of design, development, and occupation, and a ‘golden thread’ of information that links them all will become a requirement to ensure crucial safety information is not lost — as was the case at Grenfell.

Accountable persons will be required for all occupied buildings and be responsible for ensuring standards are met and held culpable if they are not.

Building inspectors, who have been heavily criticised in recent years for signing off unsafe buildings, will come under greater scrutiny. A Construction Products Regulator will be introduced to ensure that the side-stepping of proper testing processes by manufacturers that has led to dangerous materials being installed on thousands of buildings, cannot be repeated.

To oversee this regime will be a new Building Safety Regulator, with sharper teeth to sanction, and in the most egregious cases imprison, those that do not comply.

But while the changes will improve high-rise safety and give more protections for future flat owners, what about the victims of the previous system?

*****

The country is currently gripped by a building safety crisis, with hundreds of thousands of leaseholders trapped in dangerous buildings put up under a regime unfit for purpose.

These leaseholders not only go to bed every night in flats they know to be dangerous but are now facing extortionate bills — sometimes more than £100,000 each — to remove the materials that threaten their lives.

What does the Building Safety Bill include to protect them from such exorbitant costs? In short, very little.

Despite pleas from campaign groups and politicians, the Bill lacks any legislation that directly protects leaseholders from costs linked to historic defects.

Instead, what we see is something that has become a constant in the government’s response to the crisis — strong rhetoric followed by very little substantive action to help leaseholders.

Take the part of the Bill that looks to amend part of the Landlord and Tenant Act.

Under this change the government has now stipulated that there will be a legal requirement for building owners to take ‘reasonable steps’ to explore alternative ways of securing remediation costs before passing on to leaseholders. This could be through an insurance or warranty policy, or through legal action against the developer.

In principle this sounds good, but there are potential problems. Liam Spender, of Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, points out there is a lack of definition of what ‘reasonable steps’ are. They could be as little as the building owner writing a letter to a developer requesting money, getting rejected, and then opting to push the costs on to the leaseholders anyway.

He also adds that many modern leases require leaseholders to pay building owners costs if they pursue legal action, meaning leaseholders paying out more money if they lose.

The new Bill also includes an amendment to the Defective Premises Act. This is the piece of law that gives leaseholders the option to claim damages if the construction of the flat has made it unfit for habitation. The changes will extend the window in which leaseholders can sue developers from six to 15 years from the time of construction.

The amendment stole the headlines over the weekend as Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick trailed the Bill across television and radio. However, the level of impact this will have is unlikely to match the fanfare it was given.

Firstly, a large percentage of the buildings embroiled in this scandal will have been built before the 15-year period it covers. A snap survey carried out by UK Cladding Action Group found there were at least 239 affected buildings that would not be able to take advantage because their blocks were built before 2006. And with the Bill not expected to achieve Royal Assent until at least 2023, more buildings will be nudged out of scope.

Secondly, there is a reason why so few leaseholders have taken up the mantle of legal action against a cash-rich developer — it takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. And in what would be a David vs Goliath battle, there is a high chance the leaseholder would lose.

The Bill does hold one potential avenue of redress that was not available to leaseholders before though, which could make legal challenges against builders and designers easier. It proposes to repeal Section 38 of the Building Safety Act to bring it into force.

Section 38 of the Building Safety Act was written as part of the initial act in 1984 but has never been commenced, until now. It states that a breach of regulation by a developer is actionable. This could in principle make it easier for leaseholders to launch claims and win, if they can clearly prove that their developer breached building regulations at the time of construction.

Yet as with any piece of law that has yet to be tested, there are still questions. The government hasn’t published what defences and restrictions will be placed on the amendment. There is also the defence that many developers have used since Grenfell — that they followed the guidance at the time of construction and it is regulations that were inadequate.

*****

In the eyes of many leaseholders, the lack of protection offered in the Building Safety Bill will be seen as a betrayal — no doubt heightened when the building safety minister Lord Greenhalgh told delegates at the Local Government Association Conference today that while he was aware leaseholders face ‘very big bills’ for ‘seriously shoddy work’, the Building Safety Bill was not the right mechanism to address it in full.

This seemed to fly in the face of comments he made in March, when he wrote to peers telling them the Bill would be ‘the correct legislative approach’ to prevent leaseholders from having to bear re-mediation costs.

Royston Smith, the Conservative MP for Southampton and Itchen, who earlier this year led a backbench revolt of more than 30 Conservative MPs to try to implement protections for leaseholders through the Fire Safety Bill, tweeted: ‘During the passage of the Fire Safety Bill ministers promised to address leaseholders’ concerns in the Building Safety Bill. The Bill is published. It doesn’t address the fundamental issue, leaseholders should not pay.’

Mr Smith and Stephen McPartland, the MP for Stevenage, who co-led his Fire Safety Bill rebellion, have already vowed to continue the fight to protect leaseholders from costs. Expect continued challenges to the Building Safety Bill in parliament from the pair and any Conservative allies they can recruit.

*****

This sense of betrayal is likely to have huge potential political ramifications for the Conservatives. A survey last year by UKCAG of more than 1,300 leaseholders caught up in the cladding scandal found that 82 per cent said it would influence how they voted in the next election.

While the government has brought in some measures to help, not least £5 billion to cover the remediation of cladding on buildings over 18m, it will still only help out a fraction of people (the Housing Select Committee has estimated the total cost could be at least £15 billion).

This crisis is only going to grow as more and more people realise they cannot sell their homes — then face extortionate bills to make them safe.

Ultimately, the only real solution is to fix unsafe buildings put up under an inadequate regime and protect those leaseholders who are in no way responsible from these costs.

As long as it appears to leaseholders that the government is failing to protect the same homeowners it professes to be the champion of, the political costs of this scandal — not to mention the remediation bills themselves – will only grow.

Boris’s ‘lobster law’ is ridiculous

Sometimes, there is only one conclusion to be drawn – that somehow, the calendar is stuck. Though days appear to pass, it is still April 1.

The latest example of April foolishness concerns shellfish. A Bill on animal rights is currently going through the House of Lords, and the government seems minded to accept an amendment which would acknowledge that crustaceans and molluscs are sentient beings and therefore must have rights.

In the case of lobsters, this would mean that they could no longer be cooked by being thrust, still alive, into boiling water. As it happens, there is a good culinary case for putting lobsters into cold water and bringing it slowly to the boil. That is supposed to be more humane. Much more to the point, it also makes the lobster taste better.

But there is a point which is even more important than haute cuisine: why on earth should ministers be concerning themselves with lobsters? Millions of school children may have suffered educational damage due to the lockdown. A considerable number of cancer victims have had their treatment delayed, some of them, one fears, with fatal consequences. The vaccination programme has been a near-triumph. Even so, why could the pace of injections not be increased? Although there is plenty to concern us at home, the world beyond the British Isles has rarely been more unstable. All in all, there is plenty for ministers, peers and MPs to do. But lobsters. God help us.

Lewis Carroll’s ‘Lobster Quadrille’ is a charming amusement. This does not mean that nonsense verse should take over the agenda of government. We can confidently predict the next instalment of official nonsense: demands for the arrest of the Walrus and the Carpenter.

One aspect of all this should arouse our pity, and it is nothing to do with sea food. What about the poor satirist? How could he possibly outdo lobster law?

There is a principle which should surely be invoked. Where government is needed, it should be strong. Where it is not needed, it should be absent. That is common sense. But that is the problem. Common sense is not a common attribute.

We have to face facts. The sovereign people are partly to blame for all this. The notion of rights for lobsters ought to be laughed to scorn, but that may not be the public mood. Virtually every week, refrigerated lorries travel from Scotland to Spain with glorious cargoes of lobsters, langoustines, crabs and scallops. Some of the richest sea harvests in the world come from the waters of the Highlands and islands. Yet the British housewife is reluctant to open her mind, and her kitchen, to these delights. She may well prefer lobster rights to lobster thermidor.

The sentimentality which the British lavish on animals has its charms. A kitten is stuck up a tree. 999 is called, the fire brigade rushes to the scene; the moggy and its relieved owners may well get their pictures in the local paper. If anyone queried the wisdom of using an emergency line and turning out an emergency service just to rescue a feline, they would be execrated. The pussy cat protection league – Cats Protection is its proper name – benefits from a constant flow of legacies. To be fair, it lives up to its name. If a barn cat produces a litter, 20 miles up a Highland track, Cats Protection will send a Land Rover to take the offspring to a comfortable home to live out their days.

Perhaps someone will now establish a lobster charity. The poet Gérard de Nerval kept a pet lobster, which he took for walks, with a blue ribbon for a lead. He ended up killing himself. The lobster’s fate is unknown. But it was Paris… I think we can guess. Asterix and Obelix regularly agree that ‘Ils sont fous, les Anglais’. It is a terrible thought. Perhaps they were right.

Boris wriggled off the hook again at PMQs

Freedom Day on 19 July was the opening issue at PMQs. Boris welcomed the return to normality and the Labour leader offered to support a ‘balanced and reasonable’ end to lockdown. But he accused the government of being ‘reckless’. Hang on, cried Boris, Sir Keir was all in favour of Freedom Day last Monday. Can’t he make up his mind?

Sir Keir tried to re-baptise the ‘Delta strain’ the ‘Johnson variant.’ Which is unwise politics. After trying the new label once he dropped it. Perhaps a pushy intern had suggested it.

Neither leader scored a victory today. Ian Blackford of the SNP complained that the new voter-ID reforms will lead to rigged elections and a system where, ‘the government chooses voters rather than the voters choosing the government.’

A good line. Blackford’s tragedy is that he can’t isolate a killer-quote like that from his weekly cascade of verbosity. He’s like a broken fruit machine that keeps spewing plastic tokens from its gob.

Backbench questions were better. David Davis led a peasants’ revolt against cuts to foreign aid. Kevin Hollinrake suggested an intriguing reform. He named a whistleblower in a fraud case who had suffered financially during the lengthy trial. Might the impoverished witness get a slice of the pie as a reward? The sum recovered by HM Treasury was a whopping £28m. Quite a tempting hunk of cake. Boris promised that the solicitor-general would study the suggestion. Hopefully not for long. Paying witnesses in fraud cases is bound to undermine their evidence. Convicted embezzlers will cry ‘mis-trial’ and walk free.

Tim Loughton single-handedly took on the might of China. He denounced Xi Jinping as the author of genocide in Tibet, and he satirised the president’s laddish boast that he would ‘smash an opponent’s head against a wall of steel.’ Loughton then dramatically upped the stakes. He urged the Prime Minister to support ‘a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing’. Crikey! Rarely has the Commons heard such a blood-curdling threat to a foreign power. ‘Change your ways or we won’t visit your ice-rink.’

‘I’m instinctively opposed to sporting boycotts,’ replied Boris wisely. This could have escalated dangerously. If we sabotage China’s winter games, they may refuse to send their test team to Lords.

Labour’s mild-mannered backbencher, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, made a fire-cracker of a speech at the end. He recalled the death of his beloved grandmother, alone and unhugged by her kin, because of Covid restrictions. At her funeral he was forbidden from shouldering the coffin. And he attended other family funerals online in deference to the rules. It then emerged that government ministers and advisers had flouted the regulations. ‘Imagine our collective disgust,’ he thundered. He condemned the behaviour of ministers as, ‘psychotic, spineless, hypocritical’. Boiling with fury, he demanded an apology. 

‘It’s one rule for him and his chums,’ he raged at Boris, ‘and another for the rest of us plebs.’

This was powerful stuff. Boris stood up, all meek and shiny-eyed and contrite, like a Labrador puppy caught on YouTube wolfing the chocolate eclairs. He reduced his voice to ‘official mourning level’:

‘No one can imagine what it must feel like to be deprived of the ability to hold the hand of a loved-one in their last moments’.

As for the apology, he was too shrewd to withhold it and too shrewd to give it.

‘He asks me to apologise. I do. I apologise for the suffering the people of this country have endured …’

That’s not an apology. He needed to add … ‘because of me.’ Yet again the Downing Street eel wriggles off the hook.

Follow the science – it’s time to unlock

Shortly before Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer were slugging it out in PMQs — debating whether the mass-lifting of restrictions on 19 July is indeed a good idea — the Office for National Statistics released their latest antibody survey, the details of which support the Prime Minister’s argument for reopening.

It is now estimated that roughly nine in ten adults in England, Wales and Northern Ireland had antibodies in the week beginning 14 June (eight out of ten in Scotland). Moreover, antibody prevalence is on the rise in younger age groups. The percentage of adults testing positive for antibodies aged 35 and older ranges between 94 per cent and 99 per cent — with the most antibody protection detected for the elderly.

As the ONS is always quick to note, ‘detection of antibodies alone is not a precise measure of the immunity protection given by vaccination’. Despite getting vaccinated, some people will still contract Covid-19, while there are other factors like natural immunity that can influence infection. But the data is yet another reminder, not only that vaccines work, but that they work better and provide more protection than many would have dared hope this time last year.

That the vast majority of adults are now thought to have some level of antibody protection in England supports Johnson’s strategy for reopening: if we don’t open now, when? While government could wait for protection for the whole adult population to tick closer to 100 per cent, another delay to Freedom Day would risk an exit wave of infections overlapping with school returns, or a more difficult time for NHS capacity, which worsens as we head into autumn and winter months.

With the most vulnerable age groups showing the highest antibody prevalence — nearly 100 per cent — this is the moment (or, arguably, two weeks ago was the moment) to return to normal. Whatever rules stay now risk lingering for the rest of the year, if not indefinitely. But Johnson can’t just rely on good data like this to sway sceptics that reopening is the right thing to do. As James Forsyth points out, the government’s unwillingness to address how many hospitalisations they think could result from rocketing case numbers is only leading to more questions — and concern that internal figures suggest hospitals may not be able to cope.

As it happens, right now hospitalisations are notably lower than even the most optimistic Sage scenarios for late June and early July — but cagey messaging on what’s to come is unlikely to boost confidence among the nervous, who the government is hoping will start to phase themselves back into normal activity.

For better or worse, the nation has become accustomed to hearing about daily death rates. The government is better off being upfront with the nation about what to expect: more Covid hospitalisations and deaths, but far fewer than pre-vaccine times. Avoiding this frank conversation is bound to cause more trouble than an open approach.

Lords bombard flagship Animal Sentience Bill

Speak to battle-scarred Tory veterans of the 2017 snap election and they’ll regale you with horror tales about animal sentience. A little-noticed vote to reject the inclusion of the subject in the Withdrawal Bill quickly blew up into one of the major election issues, with the Independent running viral articles on the subject with inflammatory headlines that were widely shared all over social media sites. Some still credit the issue with helping to denying Theresa May her much-craved majority in that election.

In the years since then the Conservatives have handled the issue of animal welfare with extreme caution, well aware of its political volatility. Indeed shortly after the election, the then Environment Secretary Michael Gove introduced a bill on this subject but was forced to overhaul it after MPs noted it would open every government policy to judicial review. Three years on, the idea has now been resurrected in the recent Queen’s Speech, forming the flagship bill in a threadbare legislative programme.

Having already taken a bruising in the Lords chamber last month, the bill yesterday headed to the Upper House’s Grand Committee. An ominous sign of what was to come was indicated by the number of amendments laid down: 62 on a six clause, three page bill. The noble lords and ladies, resembling cashiers in a high street bank peering out behind their perspex glasses, spent some five hours eviscerating the proposed changes.

Objections were varied but most centred on the ‘Animal Sentience Committee’ which the government proposes to establish through the somewhat limited legislation. Not for nothing did the newly ennobled Lord Hannan remark on the juxtaposition of a ‘rather skeletal, emaciated, haggard, malnourished Bill that can be expanded almost at random in any direction.’

Such a committee would have its members appointed by the Environment Secretary and ‘may’ produce a report in relation to ‘any government policy’ that ‘is being or has been formulated or implemented’. These reports will set out the committee’s views on ‘whether, or to what extent, the government is having, or has had, all due regard to the ways in which the policy might have an adverse effect on the welfare of animals as sentient beings’. Critics therefore fear it will lead the government open to a barrage of judicial reviews.

Not for nothing therefore did the veterinary surgeon Lord Trees table his amendment restricting the committee to merely policy that comes into effect after the committee is established, in order to prevent retrospective reviews. Former criminal lawyer and Countryside Alliance president Baroness Mallalieu asked whether the committee will ‘pick up and choose for itself what it examines’ and warned the committee ‘has the makings of a giant and every expensive quango’ if ‘it is to roam across every government department and every policy, which would include aspects of defence, medicine and trade, quite apart from agriculture.’

Baroness McIntosh meanwhile asked why such a body was needed when the Animal Welfare Committee was already in place while for Lord Hamilton, it risked ‘new layers of bureaucracy’ boasting ‘enormous powers to interfere with other areas of government.’ For Lord Mancroft there was the question of animal rights advocates using the committee for an activist agenda, building on Lord Howard of Rising’s comments about pest control and Lord Moylan fears that animal science would be affected.

The Earl of Kinnoul similarly raised the spectre of ‘unintended consequences’ with Lord Marland warning that ‘unless strong terms of reference are imposed on the committee, we will end up destroying our countryside pursuits and making life virtually impossible for our farming and fishing community.’

The Earl of Caithness remarked that he could ‘see the judicial review process being used more heavily on this Bill than in most other legislation we have considered’ while no less a figure than Lord Etherton, the former Master of the Rolls, went so far as to say:

The Bill is entirely negative, in the sense that it seeks to impose restrictions on the way people go about their work, the way they relax and enjoy themselves, and the ways in which they can give effect to their religious values. Such restrictions go to the heart of what we regard as a diverse society in a democratic state. They go to the heart of freedom of personal conduct and belief.

Former Cabinet minister Lord Forsyth meanwhile questioned just how independent the committee would be, given that the government has claimed that committee members would be replaced if they did not perform. The legislation itself did not escape the former Scotland Secretary’s ire, with Forsyth telling peers ‘I am an extinct volcano who left government in 1997’ but that ‘in my day, if one had come to the Lords Committee with a Bill like this, it would not have got past the front door.’ Even Jenny Jones, the former Green party leader agreed with Forsyth ‘that we are getting some very poorly drafted Bills, and perhaps he could give some advice to the Government on how to improve that situation.’ Ouch.

Responding on behalf of the government was Richard Benyon, a former Defra minister in the Commons now recast in ermine in the Lords. Benyon is a popular member of their noble lordships’ house but even he struggled with the barrage of critical amendments. He told the peers how he manfully tries to sail ‘my route between Scylla and Charybdis’ of the opponents and proponents of the bill, adding drily that: ‘we will be studying Hansard very closely on what has been discussed today and we will reflect on trying to make this Bill more workable for all sides of the House.’

The legislation may aim to spare animals pain, but so far it’s caused nothing but headaches for Defra officials. For their sake, let’s hope the definition of sentient creatures expands to include Whitehall mandarins too.

Warning for No. 10 as Tory MPs re-elect Graham Brady

Graham Brady has been re-elected as chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers. Brady, who has been chair since 2010, saw off a strong challenge from the former minister and whip Heather Wheeler.

Brady’s victory is a sign of the mood on the Tory backbenches. Wheeler’s supporters argued that Brady had been too public in his criticisms of the government’s approach to lockdown. That Brady won despite having voted against the government multiple times is a sign that Tory MPs are not in a particularly deferential mood towards No. 10 and that they want someone independent-minded to represent them. Several MPs told me they were voting for Brady because they knew he would be unafraid to deliver tough messages to No. 10.

Today’s result is another reminder that the government’s majority of 80 is not as big as it first appears because Tory MPs are not as inclined to toe the line as they once were. When parliament returns to normal in the autumn, Downing Street’s parliamentary management skills will be tested as it attempts to deal with Tory revolts on planning, foreign aid and a host of other issues.

Starmer’s PMQs attack line could spell trouble for Boris

Prime Minister’s Questions proved a rather testy affair today as both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer barked questions at each other across the Commons floor. After the Prime Minister unveiled his plans on Monday for a big bang reopening in which legal rules will be replaced by a focus on personal responsibility, Starmer urged caution. 

The Labour leader quizzed Johnson on the health impact of this decision. He asked what the government estimate was for the number of hospitalisations if cases hit 50,000 a day. Johnson declined to say. 

Starmer then moved on to the practicalities of Johnson’s planned easing after the government announced that all individuals – including the double-jabbed – will continue to be required to self isolate if contacted by NHS Test and Trace until at least August. Amid claims that this could lead to as many as ten million people having to self isolate in the next six months, Starmer went on to ask Johnson if the UK was heading for a summer of chaos and confusion – to which Johnson said no. 

What helped Johnson in his answers is the fact that Labour’s own position on Covid rules isn’t particularly different to the Tories. Johnson pressed Starmer on what he would do differently. The Labour leader’s reply of masks on public transport and better ventilation was rather weak. If Starmer is so worried about the effect of high cases on both hospitalisations and daily life, surely more than face masks on the tube would be required to have a substantial effect on the R number?

Yet while Starmer didn’t come across as offering an alternative proposal, his questions still point to potential problems for the Prime Minister. He called the Delta variant the ‘Boris Johnson variant’, blaming the Prime Minister for allowing it to enter the country in the first place. 

Whether or not that name sticks, the Delta variant has made Johnson’s plans for unlocking much more difficult. The hope in No. 10 had been that by this point in the summer, not only would deaths be low so, too, would cases.

Reopening when millions risk legally-mandated self isolation for ten days is a far cry from the ‘freedom day’ first imagined. 

Graham Brady defeats Tory 1922 Committee leadership challenge

We will shortly find out who has been elected as the leader of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee after incumbent Sir Graham Brady faced a challenge from Heather Wheeler. I’m told that turnout in the election for the chair was over 90 per cent and that counting has just begun. Rather than emitting white smoke, the committee is notifying the two candidates of the result by text message.

Brady has been at the helm since 2010 and has generally been considered a reliable figure in representing the views of backbenchers to the Prime Minister. But Wheeler’s pitch — which critics say is supportive of Boris Johnson to the point that he seems to be trying to meddle in the committee — is that Brady has his own agenda, particularly when it comes to Covid restrictions.

Ambitious MPs may feel that they should be supporting Wheeler as the No. 10-backed candidate. But as it’s a secret ballot, they may end up doing something quite different. Either way, we will find out what sort of representative they want very shortly.

Cancelling To Kill a Mockingbird is a step too far

It often feels like we’re living through the revenge of the talentless. Cancel culture is essentially a war of no-marks against high achievers. Think of all those faceless furious people on Twitter who want the Harry Potter books thrown in the dumpster of history just because JK Rowling thinks biological sex is real. These people can barely string a tweet together, never mind write eight books that entrance millions. Or think of the armies of literalist bores who demand the scalp of some comic who once made an iffy joke. I bet those people have never made anyone laugh. At least not intentionally.

And now we learn that a schoolteacher in Edinburgh has decided he wants to stop teaching To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men because apparently they are outdated and offensive. Allan Crosbie, head of English at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh, may be a perfectly good teacher. But, I’m sorry, just think of the industrial levels of arrogance it must require for a teacher to decree that two of the most important American novels of the 20th century are no longer appropriate and should be erased from the curriculum. What’s the opposite of impostor syndrome? Whatever it is, I bet Mr Crosbie has it.

Mr Crosbie says Harper Lee’s and John Steinbeck’s classic novels are ‘problematic’. Isn’t everything these days? Their use of the N-word and their promotion of a ‘white saviour’ narrative make them ‘dated and problematical’, he told the EIS teaching union’s annual gathering last month. He continued: ‘Their lead characters are not people of colour. The representation of people of colour is dated. And the use of the N-word and the use of the white saviour motif in Mockingbird – these have led us as a department to decide that these really are not texts we want to be teaching third year anymore.’

And just like that, children at a school in Scotland could be deprived of the joy of reading two great novels. Two novels that form the moral backbone of modern America. Lee’s story of a child’s view of racism and justice in Depression-era America and Steinbeck’s tale of the special bond between two migrant ranch workers, also set in the Great Depression, have thrilled and moved millions. I read both at school and, yes, we were startled by the N-word. But we understood that its use in To Kill A Mockingbird was intended to illustrate the dehumanising consequences of racism. The hero of the story – lawyer Atticus Finch – actually chastises his daughter for saying it. ‘Do you defend niggers?’, she asks him. ‘Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout’, he replies.

This is the thing about the censorious, humourless cancel-culture frenzy – it rips everything out of context. So To Kill A Mockingbird can be branded racist, or at least ‘problematical’, despite being the most famous anti-racist novel ever written. Lee’s crime in the eyes of the 21st-century speech police is that she too faithfully depicted the American South of the 1930s, where the N-word would have been used widely and frequently. They essentially wish she had written a less honest novel, one where the gruff racists making false accusations of rape against a young black man said ‘African-American’ rather than ‘nigger’. Yes, that would have been realistic.

The idea that these novels might inject ‘problematical’ ideas into the minds of impressionable children is ludicrous. These are self-consciously moral stories, in which the wickedness of the world is confronted by characters with a strong sense of justice. But even if they weren’t, so what? Much of literature is bracing and confronting. Should school kids be protected from Shakespeare plays that feature insults and violence? Or Dickens novels that have a tendency to caricature the poor? This Year Zero mentality that rages against old culture and art for failing to conform to contemporary correct-think on race, sex and class is ludicrous. Very little from the past would survive if it had to pass a woke test. Guess what? People thought and spoke differently back then.

The moralistic chastisement of art and literature for failing to communicate the ‘right’ message or to use the ‘right’ language is not new, of course. Indeed, Of Mice and Men is on the American Library Association’s list of ‘The Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century’, such is the frequency of the assaults on it for its vulgar themes and racial language. Back in 1979, Ray Bradbury, in a coda to a new edition of his most famous work, Fahrenheit 451, wrote about the growing trend for special-interest groups to chastise writers for failing to depict certain communities in a positive manner. He said these people seem to want ‘dreary blancmange plain porridge unleavened literature’. ‘There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people run­ning about with lit matches’, he said of those who whip up storms of anger against ‘difficult’ writers.

There are even more people running about with lit matches today. Those who say cancel culture isn’t real, that it’s a figment of right-wingers’ imaginations, need to explain how we can have a situation where two novels that have been taught to kids for generations can be casually discarded by an English department on the basis that they are ‘problematic’. This is the world we live in now – one where even Harper Lee, for heaven’s sake, can be written off as a promoter of dodgy ideas. Listen, if they can come for Lee, they can come for anybody.

Euro 2020: Don’t underestimate the Danes

Spain are not terribly good at penalty shoot-outs. Hell, even England beat them in 1996. And so they lost a match they had dominated pretty much from start to finish. If you remember, I tipped Italy to win this tournament right at the outset — but there are flaws to this side. 

What you need to do — to state the obvious — is take the chances you create, because with Italy there will be chances. They are a counter-attacking side and invite pressure. If that pressure amounts to playing neat triangles outside the penalty area, then forget it. You need to get behind their backline, missus. You need to frighten them.

And so Denmark vs England. Our overall record against the smug hygge monkeys is, as you might expect, very good: we’ve played them 21 times and won 12 of those games, drawing five and losing four. 

However, more recently the blonde pastry-munching bores have had a distinct edge. In the last six games, we have lost three and won twice. More to the point, Denmark will be the highest-ranked Fifa team we have played against, standing tenth in the rankings (Germany are twelfth, since you asked). 

Yes, that suspicion remains that England may be flat-track bullies, something we saw during the ludicrous European Nations Cup against the Netherlands and indeed Denmark. I would again appeal for creativity from England: we need to knock the wind out of their sails early. My prediction is 2-1 to England, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.

Help, I can’t stop watching Sex/Life

On 25 June Netflix launched its latest offering, Sex/Life, which quickly became the service’s most-watched show in the UK. 

The show revolves around Billie Connelly (no, not that Billy Connolly) a beautiful but unfulfilled suburban mum, whose mundane life is peppered with flashbacks of the raunchy youth she spent living it up in the Big Apple. She is married to Cooper, an investment banker with a big heart who possesses the looks and intellect of a Ken doll. You know the story already. Billie has everything a girl should want. A husband who adores her. A Dutch colonial mansion in upstate New York. A nanny. But she can’t help lusting over her ex-boyfriend, Brad, a hot shot record executive, and the tumultuous relationship they once had. 

I began watching the show with my boyfriend who likes documentaries about power struggles in 16th-century Japan. I like the Kardashians, so most of the time we sit in stony silence staring into space. But on this occasion, I got him to crack. Within ten minutes I had to stop. I felt violated. But Sex/Life is like a horrific car crash: you can’t help but look though you know you shouldn’t. And a hangover on a Sunday morning gave me the perfect excuse to rubber-neck. 

You see, I am not above trash. In fact, I worship trash. But this show is more porn pretending to be trash. Sex/Life is 85 per cent ‘sex’ and 15 per cent ‘life’ — and that’s being generous to the ‘life‘ element. 

There is no plot. None of the characters are likeable or interesting. It feels like a program generated by a not very sophisticated algorithm. Scene after meaningless scene: sassy narrator voice, sex, housewife feminist anxiety, more sex, saccharine child-related moment, CGI-enhanced topless man, more sex, comedic moment, more sex. But the algorithm works, somehow. I found myself bored and irritated yet compelled to carry on watching through the awfulness. 

I had lots of questions. How can Netflix, a company worth $225 billion be capable of producing something so undeniably terrible? How can characters be so shallow? How could they find willing participants to act in this monstrosity? Why am I still watching? Is this how porn-addicted men feel? Do I need help? The problem is not that the show is unrealistic — most good entertainment is. We don’t mind that a university lecturer has the apartment of a rock star. We don’t ask why a new mother has the body of a Victoria’s Secret model. 

Sex/Life occasionally threatens to be interesting. The dramatic tension is meant to centre on women who are happy yet dissatisfied with family life. But each episode fails to explore that narrative thread — and then, almost apologetically, gives the viewer another sex scene. Even the sex scenes are strangely boring. The leading actor Sarah Shahi has defended the flagrant licentiousness, saying of the show that it is ‘sex represented by women for women’. But it isn’t. It is just a series dedicated to a tasteless and strangely pre-internet — or Mills & Boon — idea of ‘passion’. 

The two main characters fight and have sex and that’s about all they do. The lover Brad has an explosive temper, which is meant to make him dark and sexy. In one flashback our heroine finds out she’s pregnant. Brad doesn’t want her to be and has another Neanderthal outburst. He then redeems himself by sending the mother of his child a — wait for it — vintage leather jacket for a new born baby. Billie is moved to tears by this gracious act. She soon miscarries, which is sad as well as convenient: Sex/Life refuses to deal in complexity. 

It’s all too much but somehow I watched three whole episodes in a row. I can blame hangovers and incipient alcoholism. But really I think I may be addicted to Sex/Life, the purest trash one can stream. And I’m slightly ashamed.

The new mask regime: a legal guide

Mask wearing has been compelled by law. Very soon the government has said that compulsion will end (in England at least). There is little in life more terrifying than being British and put in a new social situation without clear rules. So while we contemplate the dread of inevitably offending someone no matter what we do, it might be helpful to clarify what this means from the point of view of the law.

The first and most important point is that just because the government stops making mask wearing a legal requirement, that doesn’t mean that mask wearing stops being a legal requirement. Why?

Because our legal system gives lots of powers to people other than government. Most of the rules or obligations you follow in any given day won’t flow directly from government.

One of the obvious areas where masks could come back is private property. In our system, the landowner sets the law of their land. That is how banks ban the wearing of crash helmets or clubs I never went to ban people wearing certain clothes I probably never owned. Everyone knows that if the landlady of the pub says you are barred, you are.

So the idea that when the government goes away, we’ll somehow be a lawless state is a bit of a fantasy. We’ve never been a wild west — we have 800 years of settled law.

If the owner (or tenant) of a property sets a rule that you have to wear a mask then you have to. You will have to wear a mask on their land if they say so, like it or not, if you want to be on their land. So the reason you may have to wear a mask may change. But the requirement may not.

If a landowner says you have to wear a mask to come in, you can refuse and go elsewhere. That’s also perfectly normal. But there will be no defying them if you choose to enter their land.

There are two caveats. Modern discrimination law will prevent a blanket mask wearing policy. Just like the government, any business doing this will have to exempt those who medically cannot wear a mask and follow the same rules the government did.

For lawyers like me, more interest will lie in the role of the law of contract. That is the power by which the landowner tries to make you wear a mask. The contract you both agree to in order to enter the land.

The law of contract is strict and generally favours you the consumer, not the landowner. The best example of which is quiet carriages on trains. Whether you like or dislike them is politics. But legally they are probably a nonsense. 

That is because very few train companies I can see incorporates them into the contract (often also called ‘terms and conditions’) before you buy a ticket. As consumers, the law protects you from these ‘hidden’ promises. If they don’t let you know in advance that quiet coaches exist, you aren’t bound by them.  

Not of course that any of that legal truth helps you if you are on a train and someone is angry. But my only focus is the law. After 19 July, the government could lift compulsory mask wearing. If landowners bring it back, comply or go elsewhere. If any pre-booked event tries, that is when it gets interesting. To me, at least.

Why England’s success is no accident

Tonight, Gareth Southgate’s England team have the opportunity to do something the Three Lions haven’t done for 55 years – reach the final of a major football tournament – and the most thrilling thing for England fans is the number of young players coming through. This isn’t just a team for this year, or the World Cup in Qatar next year, or even the next Euros in three years time. Many of these players are young enough to play for England for ten years to come.

England’s starting line-up against Ukraine only featured one player over 30, and three players in their early twenties (Jadon Sancho, 21, and Declan Rice and Mason Mount, both 22). Of the second half substitutes, Marcus Rashford, – already an England veteran, with 45 caps and an MBE to boot – is still only 23, while Jude Bellingham, incredibly, has only just turned 18. Over half the squad is 25 or under. Bukayo Saka, man of the match against the Czechs, is 19. Phil Foden and Reece James are 21… The list goes on and on.

So where do all these young players come from? Why have England suddenly got such an abundance of supremely gifted youngsters? Of course, it’s partly happenstance. Clumps of brilliant young players have galvanised the French and German sides in recent years, and will surely galvanise them again in years to come. But for the moment, the team with youth on its side is England, and the emergence of the current crop has a lot to do with the development of the English football academy system over the last ten years.

I was lucky enough to get a close-up view of this system when my son joined Watford FC’s academy at the age of eight (he was there until he was 16). One of his teammates was Jadon Sancho, who was at Watford until he was 14, when he joined Manchester City. These boys got first class coaching, played against the biggest English teams (like Arsenal, Spurs and Chelsea) and went on frequent foreign tours, to play against top European sides like Roma and Benfica. It was a great football education, and a great experience.

Of course, only a handful of academy players end up playing professionally (let alone for England) but I can’t think of a single player I saw in those eight years who wasn’t significantly improved. Playing with and against the best players, training with excellent coaches in superb facilities, whether you were one of the few who moved onto bigger things or one of the many who eventually dropped down the leagues, academies have lifted the standard of English football at every level. Now, even semi-pro teams are full of players who’ve been at big clubs as youngsters, and it shows. Big clubs have always had youth teams, but the set-up has come on in leaps and bounds during the past decade. Today’s young England stars are the first generation to come through the current system. They’re living proof of its success.

The academy system has attracted criticism on account of the considerable demands it makes of young footballers, most of whom are bound to fall by the wayside. It’s quite true that almost everyone gets let go sooner or later, and it’s quite true that when that rejection comes it’s bound to hurt. However I guess you could say much the same of young girls who go to ballet school. Sadly, there are some things you have to start learning at a very early age if you want to stand even the slightest chance of performing at the highest level. For better or worse football, like ballet, is one of those things.

And for the vast majority who don’t go all the way, academy football can open other doors. Many American universities offer scholarships to academy players, and some of England’s leading independent schools provide similar opportunities at A level. My son got a sixth form scholarship to Bradfield College, captained the England independent schoolboys national team while he was there, got a professional contract at Burnley, and then played for several semi-pro clubs before going to Loughborough University. Sure, every academy player dreams of playing for England, and he was no exception, but so long as those youngsters realise this is just a longshot, academy football can be a win-win. He’s proud to have played alongside Jadon Sancho, and so he should be. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle observed, talent always recognises genius. Only mediocrity knows nothing greater than itself.

Which brings us back to tonight’s game, and England’s chances. This is England’s fifth semi-final since they won the World Cup in 1966, and although they’ve lost the last four (in 1968, 1990, 1996 and 2018) this one feels different. Although the team is full of youthful flair, six of the starting line-up against Ukraine (Pickford, Walker, Stones, Maguire, Kane and Sterling) and three of the subs (Trippier, Henderson and Rashford) are veterans of the last World Cup, three years ago, when England went out in the semi-final against Croatia. Youth and experience: it’s a winning combination.

And unlike most English pundits, my confidence in an England victory isn’t tainted by wishful thinking. For familial reasons I’ve always supported Germany (I was at Wembley in 1996 when Southgate missed that crucial penalty) and it was some crumb of comfort that I called it right when I previewed the England v Germany game for The Independent, and predicted that England would win. My prediction this time, for what it’s worth, is that England will win the semi-final, against Denmark, but lose the final, against Italy. However for England fans, that shouldn’t matter too much. With an average age of just 24, this is a squad that’s going to carry on getting even better. After 55 years of chronic underachievement, at last England fans can look forward to a decade of spectacular success.

Cummings reveals the Unionist heart of darkness

Like Walter Kurtz, Dominic Cummings had immense plans but was tripped on the threshold of greatness by the weaknesses of his superiors. Now he holds court from his fortress temple of Substack where, in the fashion of Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard, subscribers receive his glum musings on Covid strategy, systems management and judicial review. Cummings is sometimes regarded as a brilliant sociopath and while I sway back and forth on whether the emphasis belongs on the adjective or the noun, his insights into how government really works are immensely valuable to understanding policy-making, implementation and the impotence of power.

I have come to the view that, if you want to study government in Britain, you could subject yourself to three or four years of being expensively miseducated in those theory-throttled closed shops called universities, but you’ll get a more accurate and less pricey education from binge-watching Yes, Minister and The Thick of It. We can probably add Cummings’s blogs to this alternative curriculum, though they sadly lack the comedy stylings of Antony Jay and Armando Iannucci.

Cummings has attracted fresh attention after taking time out of kicking the Prime Minister on Covid to kick him on devolution. Posed a question about Boris Johnson’s true feelings on the Union during a subscriber-only Q&A (said subscriber being, it turned out, a hack for the National), Cummings replied:

He’s an unthinkign [sic] unionist. Thinks devolution/Scottish parliament was a disaster, wd [sic] like to reverse it but wont [sic] dare try…

This gave the Bute House Bugle the headline it wanted: ‘Boris Johnson is an unthinking Unionist who wants to reverse devolution, Cummings says’. In one sense, this isn’t terribly new. The Prime Minister reportedly told a Zoom chat of Tory MPs last November that ‘devolution has been a disaster north of the border’ and was ‘Tony Blair’s biggest mistake’. This is a scandalous thing to say in Scotland, where the devolution industry has created a proto-state (and careers) for a new nationalist establishment and satellite elites in politics, media and civil society. It has not delivered a fraction of its oft-promised potential on policy-making or outcomes and has become a captive of progressive-sounding but deeply reactionary ideas about freedom of expression, gender identity and women’s rights.

Where devolution has wrought the most damage is on the constitution and specifically the Union. Bearing in mind the rationale given in Labour’s 1997 manifesto — ‘The Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed’ — devolution has been a disaster on its own terms. Tides of nationalist sentiment have waxed and waned over the years in Scotland but devolution built a political infrastructure for Labourite soft-nationalists that, within a decade, had fallen into the hands of SNP hard-nationalists, where it has remained ever since. The primary purpose of the Scottish government is to achieve independence, Holyrood elections are said to deliver mandates for secession referendums, and an expansionist, confrontational administration seeks out conflict with Whitehall and even pursues an autonomous foreign policy.

I can’t speak to the Prime Minister’s purported wish to return to the status quo ante 1999, but two of Cummings’s points ring true, though perhaps not necessarily in the sense he intends them. If Boris Johnson is indeed a Unionist, he does appear to be an unthinking one. I have repeatedly made the point — not to be repetitive but because it genuinely astonishes me — that after 22 years of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, the Conservatives still haven’t come up with a Tory theory of devolution. They were mostly opposed when New Labour brought the policy forward, warning it would put Britain on the road to disintegration, and since coming to power in 2010 have either sought to slow the pace of travel or, in the lamentable case of David Cameron, speed it up.

A thinking Unionist would show some evidence of reflecting on these trends and on the reforms necessary to return devolution to its original purpose and stop separatists misusing its institutions to break up the United Kingdom. I would humbly suggest the PM start here, here, here, or with Professor Adam Tomkins’s more scholarly offerings. I assume, however, that this isn’t the kind of thinking Cummings has in mind based on his comment elsewhere in the Q&A, in which he says: ‘Unionists need to build a Vote Leave that is ‘living in the village’, not attackign [sic] the village’. Treating the Union as a matter for Scotland rather than the whole country is what got us where we are today. Britain is the village and the constitutional question must be approached from that perspective.

As to the PM’s daring, Cummings is almost certainly right. Nothing in Boris Johnson’s career hints at a skerrick of courage or vision and if he realises what a historic error devolution was, his unwillingness to do more than the bare minimum about it — to prize his own political capital and let the next guy worry about it — is about as on-brand Boris as you can get. I am not convinced of the case for reversing legislative devolution, which turned out to be a foolish and destructive idea but is nonetheless one that parliament asked the people to vote on and the people rendered their verdict. Parliament should no sooner undo that outcome than it should the result of the 2016 referendum. But returning to administrative devolution would at least be a policy, an idea — a notion. The Prime Minister lacks even that. If the ‘Minister for the Union’ was anyone else, he would have sacked him by now.