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Is your private school dumbing down?
Bankruptcy, as Ernest Hemingway famously said, comes ‘gradually, then suddenly’. For Britain’s private schools floundering in the wake of the VAT rise on fees imposed in January this year, the gradual decline is well underway. Not only have an estimated 11,000 pupils left private schools so far in an unprecedented – and poorly forecast by Labour – mid-academic year exodus and smaller private schools have closed, but now Chinese whispers have begun about the lowering of academic standards.
Pleading anonymity, several mothers muttered that pupils that would ‘never normally be through the door’ were found in their children’s classes
According to unnamed sources in the Telegraph, headteachers are quoted as saying that they have no choice but to ‘widen the net’, adding that ‘schools where it’s usually very challenging to secure a place’ are now less scrupulous about their standards; ‘you can see how nervous the sector is’. Put simply, if you can cough up, you’re in. Just don’t mention CAT scores or the ISEB. It’s not about that anymore. Instead it’s about ‘pastoral care’, ‘sporting excellence’ and all sorts of other platitudes, rather than your child’s accelerated reader performance.
This was always going to happen. No sooner did Labour remove the charitable status of private schools than their demeanour started to change. They are now operating far more like normal industry players than the Byzantine Enid Blyton-esque institutions of yore. Private schools, like all revenue-driven businesses, need to make money and money comes through a blunt headcount, not necessarily the brilliance of the heads in question. No longer charitable institutions that once had to demonstrate significant public benefit through bursaries and other outreach schemes, private schools can’t raise capital in ways that other businesses could. Yes, there were private schools that operated as corporate structures in the prelapsarian days before the VAT rise (Prince Williams’s prep school Wetherby’s for example), but these were in the minority at 30 per cent of the total number of independent schools. Not anymore.
Naturally this comes as a shock to its core middle to upper-middle class customer, unaccustomed to the nuts and bolts of rude capitalism on display. Once upon a time, you admired the grounds on match day and stood in the pavilion chatting to your fellow mummies about uniform and holiday plans. Now, not a day goes by when parents do not receive some letter or other from the bursar detailing snazzy changes to the school designed to guarantee our loyalty, not just to the institution but to the brand. For it is the revenue-driving potential of the brand that school marketeers salivate over when they create Instagram reels and glossy brochures that will outdo the competition.
In my corner of Oxfordshire – a veritable theme-park of private schools – the competition is stiff. A quick WhatsApp straw poll of ambitious mothers reveals some of the ways in which private schools are commercialising themselves: Stowe (alma mater of Richard Branson) is now lowering the price of day places to prep-school rates; Cothill (famously the feeder school to Eton) will go co-educational from September 2025 joining Winchester and other schools that can no longer afford to be single-sex; my own daughter’s prep school will open a senior school from 2026 with discounted fees up to GCSE level.
But as schools are finding out, intensive and commercial net-widening inevitably comes at the attrition of standards and the ire of parents. Pleading anonymity, several mothers muttered that pupils that would ‘never normally be through the door’ were found in their children’s classes, a trend that will likely continue as the new academic year approaches in September 2025 and private schools find themselves at the sharp end of the margin. A margin that, as one bursar told me, ‘comes down to the bloody wire… it’s often just a question of a family or a single pupil that tips the balance’. Certainly, the big-name private schools – Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster – will always have their pick of the best pupils and may continue to be over-subscribed, but it is beyond doubt that the pool of parents is smaller and more demanding.
Smaller, more modest institutions such as Park Hill in Surrey (recently closed) have already lost out. In a time of unprecedented sector transition from charitable to commercial endeavour, it seems that disruption comes equally from within as without.
My daughter, upon hearing that she may be able to stay at her prep school until she is 16, jumps for joy. I don’t have the heart to tell her that either the school or her parents may be bankrupt before then. But not to worry, it will all be very sudden. Just ask Hemingway.
Labour’s welfare rebels will regret their revolt
A Labour government facing a rebellion over welfare reform is something of a dog-bites-man story – Labour never finds this issue easy. But the nature of the current rebellion tells us something novel and revealing, not about the policy, but about the modern Member of Parliament.
Yes, principle and policy matter here, but what’s really driving dissent on Labour’s backbenches is not ideology, but geography. Or more precisely, constituency geography.
Many of the Labour MPs likely to defy the leadership on welfare cuts are not old lags or even rebels by temperament. Many are new to Westminster, elected in the 2024 landslide that gave Labour power. And their rebellion is not really born of Corbynite nostalgia or factional muscle-flexing. Instead, it reflects the simple, brutal truth that the job of an MP has changed – and changed profoundly.
These MPs were elected with a tacit remit: represent us, not the leadership
Simply, MPs no longer exercise their judgement on behalf of their voters in the best interest of constituency and country. Instead they dance to the tune sung by the loudest voices in their seats. Edmund Burke? Never heard of him. We are all populists now.
Many of these new MPs sit on slim majorities. Many are in places where Labour has not historically been strong, or where voters lent their support on the basis of ‘give the other lot a chance’.
That makes these MPs cautious. They are not ideological crusaders; they are political caretakers, aware that even a modest swing could turf them out in 2029.
Many of these MPs were chosen as candidates not by party bosses but by local constituency Labour parties, many of which imposed strict requirements for candidates to have strong local links. In practice, that meant selecting people who would be constituency champions first and parliamentary representatives second. They were elected with a tacit remit: represent us, not the leadership. Do what the voters say, not what the whips want.
In years past, an MP could take a tough vote in Westminster, spend the weekend lying low and hope to ride out any local discomfort. Not anymore. Constituents can now express outrage with astonishing speed and reach. One vote in the House of Commons can trigger a hundred angry emails before teatime. MPs talk of inboxes flooded daily with demands, complaints, even threats – each message carrying the implicit warning: ‘Ignore me and I’ll tell everyone I know.’
Some backbenchers report receiving upwards of a hundred emails a day. Each one feels urgent. Each one, potentially, a vote lost. And with social media serving as a megaphone for grievance, the stakes are high. One unanswered constituent email is no longer just a minor oversight – it’s a potential Facebook post shared across local groups, a TikTok rant that ends with ‘this is why I’m never voting Labour again’.
All of which makes the politics of welfare reform exceedingly difficult. The government’s proposals are, in broad terms, sensible: a modest tightening of fiscal policy aimed at curbing long-term spending. But to the newly elected MP from a marginal seat, they look like a live grenade. Cut benefits? Even just slow their growth? Cue a tidal wave of local outrage.
The real story of this rebellion is not about ideology or principle or even the Starmer team’s party management. It is about how the role of an MP has shifted from legislator to local caseworker, from party loyalist to localist public servant in the most literal sense. This new hyper-local, hyper-responsive model of representation is noble in theory but toxic to good governance. It makes every hard national decision a political minefield of potential local explosions.
And yet, there is a deeper irony here – one that deserves attention. The very MPs who are blocking welfare reform to keep their local voters happy may well be ensuring those same voters end up unhappier in the long run. Britain’s ever-growing welfare bill already threatens the state’s ability to deliver the other public goods people value most.
This is a country that spends over £100 billion a year just servicing its debt, that cannot fully defend itself against foreign threats, where local councils are sliding into bankruptcy trying – unsuccessfully – to care for the elderly and educate children with special needs.
The more the welfare bill expands, the more it crowds out spending on those vital functions. The very things that voters prize – local health, local schools, local services – are being slowly strangled by a welfare-fuelled fiscal burden that no government dares challenge.
And so the new tribunes of the people, by blocking reform today, are sowing the seeds of tomorrow’s grievances. Their voters will come knocking again. And this time, the complaint won’t be about one email unanswered or even some welfare cuts – it’ll be about a state that cannot answer their needs at all.
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Why does Starmer want to grow Britain’s nuclear arsenal?
The government published its National Security Strategy 2025 earlier this week, a strange pushmi-pullyu document building on some policy reviews and anticipating others. It is disappointing and unfocused.
The national security strategy was accompanied by an announcement perhaps just as significant: the government will buy at least 12 Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning strike fighters which are ‘dual capable’, that is, they can deliver both conventional and nuclear weapons. These aircraft will give the Royal Air Force a nuclear role for the first time since 1998, and the UK’s nuclear capacity will no longer be reliant on the Royal Navy’s Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines.
Keir Starmer has a peculiar and unsettling enthusiasm for the UK’s nuclear deterrent
This is significant in all sorts of ways: militarily, conceptually and in terms of doctrine and planning. There are currently nine states with nuclear weapons and the UK is alone in having a single method of delivery, the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile. By buying F-35As capable of carrying B61-12 tactical nuclear bombs, Britain can join Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey in contributing to Nato’s nuclear sharing arrangement.
Here is the detail, however, and its attendant devil. Nato currently has around 100 of these bombs: they are all owned by the United States and could only be used with the permission of the alliance’s Nuclear Planning Group and the American president. There is no suggestion that the UK is likely to develop its own tactical nuclear weapons. Its F-35s would join similar aircraft from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as ageing F-16 Fighting Falcons from Belgium and Turkey, in being available to conduct nuclear strikes.
The new aircraft will operate from RAF Marham in Norfolk; the existing fleet of F-35Bs are also based at Marham but deploy operationally on the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, which the new F-35As cannot do. (The F-35A is also incompatible with the RAF’s Voyager tanker aircraft so will be unable to refuel in-flight.)
The government is not acquiring a sovereign capability here. The aircraft can be used for non-nuclear roles as well, of course, but it would be odd to choose to buy a small number of a different variant from the rest of the force if it was not intended for a specific purpose. We are buying into a nuclear club: helping our allies, certainly, but also paying for a better table, at a cost of around £80 million per aircraft.
These are secondary issues. The more concerning argument is that Nato is strengthening its tactical nuclear capability in order, presumably, to provide a stronger deterrent against Russian or other aggression. President Vladimir Putin has threatened repeatedly to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the logic seems to be that we must be able to match him.
Downing Street described the plan to buy the F-35A aircraft as ‘the biggest strengthening of the UK’s nuclear posture in a generation’. This is self-evidently true: our policy since at least the end of the Cold War has been to provide leadership on non-proliferation, maintaining a minimum credible deterrence and ruling out using Trident as a first-strike weapon. Now, without any visible heart-searching or hesitancy, the government has decided that the geopolitical situation requires more, not fewer, nuclear weapons, so that it can deliver, in Starmer’s words, ‘peace through strength’.
There is an argument that low-yield tactical nuclear weapons are de-escalatory, providing more options for varying circumstances and preventing the immediate resort to more powerful warheads.
I am sceptical. Surely it is just as possible that tactical weapons would lower the nuclear threshold, which lies less between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and more between conventional and nuclear warfare. Smaller tactical weapons are in some ways intended to make ‘going nuclear’ more, not less, likely.
This is all theoretical. A nuclear weapon has not been used in anger for nearly 80 years, since the 21-kiloton ‘Fat Man’ bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. (The maximum yield of a merely tactical B61-12 bomb is sixteen times that of ‘Fat Man’.) What targets would we deem justifiable for tactical weapons? Armoured formations, warships, military installations, infrastructure? What casualties would we see as regrettable but necessary? And once the nuclear threshold is crossed, how do we get back?
Keir Starmer has a peculiar and unsettling enthusiasm for the UK’s nuclear deterrent. He brandishes its power and necessity with such muscularity that it sometimes feels like overcompensation for Labour’s unilateralism which was set aside nearly 40 years ago. The lead author of the Strategic Defence Review, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, told Parliament’s defence committee that acquiring tactical nuclear weapons was not absent from its recommendations by chance.
The fact that it’s not there indicates that we weren’t terribly enthusiastic about it. When I was defence secretary the last time round, I got rid of the free-fall bombs.
To modify a catchphrase from the 2010 general election, which feels like a lifetime ago, I agree with George.
Spain won’t escape Trump’s wrath for its Nato rebellion
At yesterday’s Nato summit in The Hague, all but one of the 32 leaders agreed to increase their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP as President Trump has been demanding. The exception was Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. His insistence that actually 2.1 per cent will be enough has enraged President Trump.
Trump described the Nato summit’s achievements as ‘tremendous’, celebrating its recognition of the need for other Nato members to take up the burden of the defence of Europe. He added that ‘it was 2 per cent [of GDP] and we’ve got it up to 5 per cent’. But he had harsh words for Spain, describing the country as ‘terrible’ and threatening to use trade tariffs ‘to make them [Spain] pay twice as much’.
Spain’s left-wing politicians seem delighted with Trump’s displeasure
This confrontation has been brewing for months. Ever since Trump’s re-election, Sánchez has been positioning himself as a leading opponent of the US President. Indeed Spain’s socialist prime minister and his supporters have repeatedly suggested that Trump’s victory in the US elections is confirmation of a sinister surge in global far-right extremism that embraces Brexit, Orban, Meloni, Wilders, Bolsonaro, Milei and is also increasingly evident in France and Germany.
For Sánchez it’s a dangerous, world-wide threat that he’s called upon to counter. He and his ministers seem to regard it as their mission to lead the struggle against an erosion of democracy and exultation of xenophobia of which, they say, Trump is the most powerful exponent. Presenting themselves as the heirs of the noble republicans who fought against General Franco in the civil war (1936-1939), Spain’s socialists feel that they are especially well-placed to understand and combat this ‘fascist threat’.
It’s a convenient conceit since it justifies Sánchez in clinging to power. Engulfed in corruption scandals, he’s under enormous pressure to call a general election. But Sánchez is insisting that, in fact, it is his duty to stay; after all, an election would almost certainly lead to a right-wing government which relied on the support of Vox – a right-wing party close to Trump which Sánchez and his followers describe as fascist.
Anti-American sentiment has deep roots in Spain. The 1953 Pact of Madrid, giving the US military bases in Spain, appeared to legitimise and consolidate Franco’s regime. The left, having harboured hopes that the US might one day help remove the dictator, felt betrayed. More recently, when he became prime minister in 2004, socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero immediately withdrew troops from Iraq, incurring President Bush’s wrath and earning Spain a reputation as an unreliable ally but boosting his popularity and pacifist credentials at home.
The country has also always been divided over membership of Nato. When Spain joined in 1982, the socialists took to the streets with banners reading ‘No to Nato’. Later, when they came to power, they changed their mind as they experienced what Prime Minister Felipe González called ‘a brutal process of adaptation to reality’.
González had already promised a referendum on Nato membership, however. With only 19 per cent of Spaniards in favour of membership, it was no easy task for him to get a majority to reaffirm Spain’s membership in the referendum held in 1986. But shameless exploitation of state media, including his final, passionate plea to the nation the evening before the vote, eventually ensured a narrow majority of 52 per cent in favour of staying in Nato.
Discontent with Nato and the defence spending that membership entails is never far away, however. In April, when Prime Minister Sánchez promised to increase Spain’s defence budget from 1.3 to 2 per cent of GDP, the radical left-wing and separatist parties that are propping up his fragile minority coalition government immediately accused him of war-mongering.
Now Spain’s left-wing politicians seem delighted with Trump’s displeasure. One immediately announced that ‘it’s always been a good thing to piss off a neoliberal fascist’. Another said that Spain’s refusal to pay 5 per cent proved that it was not a ‘vassal state’. A third called for Spain to leave Nato, which she described as ‘a criminal and terrorist organisation’. It remains to be seen how the Spanish people will react to Trump’s threats to punish them with tariffs.
For Trump, solving Ukraine won’t be as easy as Iran
For the moment, at least, the world seems to be going Donald Trump’s way. Instead of setting the Middle East ablaze, Trump’s air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have been met by a single, casualty-free Iranian counterstrike on the US’s al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. And though Tehran described the attack as ‘mighty and successful’, it emerged that Iran had actually warned the Qatar authorities in advance of the strikes – a message that they immediately passed on to the Americans.
At the Nato summit in the Hague this week, European leaders lined up to support Trump’s demand that they ‘pay their way’ and boost their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed the new defence bonanza as an opportunity to boost European innovation and announced a ‘Rearm Europe’ plan to mobilise €650 billion (£554 million) in defence investment. Every Nato member state (except for Spain) signed up to the new 5 per cent target – even though for most members that figure entails doubling, or in some cases tripling, defence budgets.
Trump came to office promising to be a peacemaking president
Nato’s secretary-general Mark Rutte even sent Trump an effusive note praising his strikes on Iran. ‘Mr President, dear Donald, Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do,’ gushed Rutte in language apparently intended to mirror Trump’s own bombastic tweeting style. ‘Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world,’ continued Rutte.
It was not easy but we’ve got them all signed onto 5 per cent! You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.
It was a very different reaction to the last time Trump addressed a Nato summit in London back in 2019. Then, a hot-mike moment caught Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, British premier Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and – yes – Mark Rutte, then-Dutch prime minister sniggering over Trump’s lateness. Trump was so incensed by the mockery that he flew home early, but not before blasting Trudeau as being ‘two faced’ and criticising him for failing to meet Nato’s spending benchmark – then a mere 2 per cent of GDP.
Remarkably, Trump’s order to both Israel and Iran to cease fire after twelve days of massive bombardments seems to be holding. More impressive still is that both sides immediately began to violate the ceasefire but were immediately brought to heel by hard words from the White House.
That leaves just one major fire on Trump’s foreign policy horizon that’s still burning: Ukraine. As he was campaigning for the presidency, Trump vowed that he would stop the conflict ‘within 24 hours’. In practice, three months of intensive negotiations both by Trump envoys and by phone direct with Putin have yielded nothing but weasel words from the Kremlin. At the same time, the White House’s relationship with the Ukrainians reached rock bottom after Volodymyr Zelensky’s train wreck meeting with Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office in February was followed by a freeze on US arms and funding to Kyiv.
But the Nato summit seemed to yield some positive news for Ukraine, too. Trump was photographed, beaming, beside Macron and Zelensky – whom he described as ‘a nice guy’. When a Ukrainian reporter asked Trump about the US providing air defence systems, the President asked her about where her husband was – and on learning that he was a soldier, he said, ‘I wish you a lot of luck, I can see it’s very upsetting to you.’ He also promised to send ‘some’ Patriots to Kyiv, noting that the US needed them and so did Israel.
But most significantly, Trump blocked Putin’s attempt to pivot away from Ukraine by publicly squashing the Kremlin’s offers to mediate between Washington and Iran. ‘I’ve spoken to Putin. I said no, I don’t need help on Iran,” Trump told reporters. “Do me a favour, help with Russia.’
Trump’s hard words for Putin were a welcome sign to Ukrainians that the White House does retain some scepticism about Putin’s hollow claims to be serious about peace. At the same time, though, Trump’s team made it clear that they saw talks, not military aid, as the only solution to the conflict. ‘@POTUS has been abundantly clear the Russia-Ukraine war must end,’ tweeted Secretary of State Marco Rubio. ‘There is no military solution, only a diplomatic one.’ But there were hopeful words for the Kremlin too. Rubio added that the US would not be imposing additional sanctions against Russia because if ‘we come in and crush them with more sanctions, we probably lose our ability to talk to them about the ceasefire and then who’s talking to them?’
In the space of a few days, Trump went from bombing Iran to being bombed to a ceasefire, allowing all sides to claim victory. Trump also succeeded in not only persuading recalcitrant Europeans to massively increase their defence spending but also in making them enthusiastic about doing it. Vice President Vance also articulated what he called the ‘brutally simple’ Trump Doctrine:
Define a clear American interest. Push hard through diplomacy. If that fails, strike fast, win quick, and get out – before it becomes another endless war.
Trump came to office promising to be a peacemaking president. After three months in office, he’s fought his first short, victorious war. But it will be achieving a lasting peace in Ukraine – and wrangling the notoriously stubborn and duplicitous Putin into a deal – that will be the Trump’s true foreign policy test.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s world edition.
Who won the 12-day war?
As the dust settles from the United States and Israel’s sweeping strikes on the Islamic Republic regime’s nuclear infrastructure, a new battle has begun – one of narratives. Who really won? What damage was truly done? And what, precisely, has changed?
The regime in Tehran claims resilience. Israel says deterrence has been re-established. Washington insists it achieved total destruction and victory. But beneath the declarations is the harder reality: wars don’t end with scoreboards, but with contested facts and uncertain consequences.
Caution is warranted. The regime survives. Its ideology remains intact. Its opacity has deepened. What has been destroyed may eventually be rebuilt
What is clear is that the campaign against Iran was unprecedented in scope and ambition. Over 12 days, Israel and the United States launched coordinated strikes against three core components of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme: Natanz, Isfahan, and the heavily fortified Fordow complex. According to the Israel Defence Forces, the operation had been in preparation for years, fast-tracked only when intelligence pointed to the regime approaching a nuclear ‘point of no return’. The strikes were designed not merely to degrade, but to paralyse.
Prime Minister Netanyahu called the outcome a ‘historic victory’, citing the elimination of major nuclear sites, missile launchers, and 29 senior military officials. President Trump, speaking at the Nato summit in the Hague, was similarly blunt: ‘It’s gone for years, years.’ He likened the impact to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not in scale of destruction, but in strategic finality. A war-ender.
There is evidence to support that view. The Islamic Republic’s own foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baqaei, admitted to Al-Jazeera that the strikes had caused ‘severe damage’ to its nuclear infrastructure and dealt a heavy blow to diplomatic efforts. But just how severe remains unclear. A preliminary US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment, leaked to the press, offers a more cautious view. It suggests the Fordow facility’s underground core may still be structurally intact, and that the programme could recover within months. A senior DIA official later clarified that this was ‘a preliminary, low confidence assessment – not a final conclusion,’ and that on-site inspection will be necessary to draw firm conclusions.
Unnamed Israeli sources initially echoed the uncertainty, though cautiously. Two officials quoted by ABC News reportedly said it was too early to declare the operation a success. One described the outcome at Fordow as ‘really not good,’ citing unresolved questions about how much enriched uranium was moved before the strikes and how many centrifuges might still be salvageable. But such accounts, like the DIA leak itself, are fragments: partial views of a wider intelligence mosaic. Media coverage tends to extract individual assessments or snippets of conversation, often out of context and shaped by editorial agendas. Just as states craft their narratives, so too do news organisations, whose reporting may amplify ambiguity while overlooking the classified consensus. As one Israeli source noted, establishing the full picture could take months, or prove impossible, but whatever conclusions emerge will come from comprehensive analysis, not headlines.
To try and quell such rumours, yesterday evening the Israeli Chief of theGeneral Staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, issued a formal statement declaring that senior officers in IDF Intelligence and Israeli nuclear experts had assessed the blow to Iran’s nuclear project as ‘not a limited one—it was systemic.’ He added: ‘We struck main facilities, factories, industrial sites, and knowledge centres. The cumulative achievement allows us to state that Iran’s nuclear project suffered severe, broad, and deep damage, setting it back by years. We have demonstrated our resolve: we will not allow Iran to produce weapons of mass destruction.’
Additionally, Halevi said Israel had struck a severe blow to the Iranian missile capabilities, ‘destroying hundreds of launchers and missiles, and causing significant delays in their force-building plans. In addition, we achieved intelligence, technological, and aerial superiority. We attained full control of Iranian airspace and of every location where we chose to act.’ Israeli forces operated ‘covertly, deep in enemy territory’ and enjoyed ‘freedom of operational manoeuvre.’
Adding to the ambiguity is the Islamic Republic’s decision to suspend all cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi confirmed that the agency no longer knows the location of nearly 900 pounds of enriched uranium that the regime claims it moved for ‘protective reasons’. However, the Islamic Republic regime is known to lie, and certainly would like us to worry they have rescued plenty of their costly nuclear material. With inspections halted, the international community is being asked to assess a disappearing target.
But if the technical picture is clouded, the political one is sharper. The regime’s retaliation began with brutality. On the first day responding to Israel’s strikes it fired between 150 and 250 ballistic missiles at Israeli cities and military targets, inflicting serious damage and killing civilians. But as Israeli strikes dismantled launch sites and disrupted command infrastructure, the volume of fire steadily declined. What began as a lethal barrage soon became a dwindling trickle: fewer than 20 missiles a day by the final phase, though still deadly. Some of the missiles were more advanced, which might mean the lower numbers reflected an attempt to conserve capability as options narrowed. Overall, what looked initially like defiance gave way to degradation.
Its sole retaliation against the United States was even more revealing. The regime struck a US base in Qatar apparently with full advance warning. All personnel were evacuated. No damage occurred. The message was scripted for domestic audiences: a performance of strength carefully choreographed to avoid escalation. In effect, a surrender disguised as a counterstrike.
That the regime accepted a ceasefire just hours after its most devastating losses, including the assassination of nearly 30 senior commanders, reinforces the point. This was not a negotiated pause; it was a forced halt.
Still, caution is warranted. The regime survives. Its ideology remains intact. Its opacity has deepened. What has been destroyed may eventually be rebuilt. The wager of the strikes is that deterrence will hold, and that the risk and cost of recovery will deter the attempt. President Trump has made his position clear: any renewed enrichment will trigger another strike. ‘Sure,’ he said, when asked whether the US would act again. For now, the Islamic Republic appears to believe him.
So, who won? Israel and the United States achieved their stated operational goals. They inflicted profound damage, exposed the regime’s strategic weakness, and imposed a ceasefire on their terms. The Islamic Republic responded with posture, not power. But war is not only about what is destroyed. It is about what is rebuilt, and who gets to decide. That contest is not over. The war may have ended. The struggle over its meaning has just begun.
The abortion debate is as old as time
Now that parliament has decided to decriminalise abortion, it is interesting to see what the ancients made of the matter. The question for them was, as for us – when did the foetus become ‘human’? The answer was when it developed a psukhê (‘soul’).
Some Greek philosophers argued that the foetus was fully ‘ensouled’ from the moment of conception, and abortion was therefore wrong. Others asserted it was only ensouled at birth. The ‘gradualists’ thought the foetus took between 36 and 50 days to became human (active kicking was a good sign). Aristotle (d. 322 BC) argued that the embryo became human when it had developed four ‘capacities’ in the following sequence – nutrition, motion, perception/sensation and finally reason. That took the male 40 days, the female 90. Aristotle’s position was extremely influential.
When it came to the actual practice, doctors wanted nothing to do with abortion unless the woman’s life was at risk (the famous Oath forbade doctors from ‘giving an abortifacient’). Hippocrates was well aware of what such painful and dangerous procedures entailed (‘a foetus cannot be aborted without violence’). Doubtless women were the best judges of the matter, and were acquainted with the drugs, vaginal pessaries, medications and physical exercises that might do the business, but the existence of paid abortionists was no secret. One would love to have known the views of the famous female doctor Agnodice (4th C BC), who had to disguise herself as a man in order to practise.
Although what the Bible has to say on the matter offers no guidance at all (see the bizarre scenario at Exodus 21:22-4), Christians were rigorously opposed to abortion. Though they may well have been influenced by the Jewish instruction to ‘go forth and multiply’ – probably for demographic reasons? – over time they seem to have adopted a 40-day ‘gradualist’ position with which St Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) agreed. But in 1869 Pope Pius IX ended all debate, asserting that ‘ensoulment’ occurred on conception.
What makes this ancient debate so interesting is that neither Greeks nor Romans had any problems at all about exposing children at birth…
Millennials don’t want brown furniture
For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death it was passed on to my mother, who kept it grudgingly in her cottage even though you couldn’t get to the kitchen without banging your hip against its bow front. At some stage it was passed on to my sister, who paid a considerable sum to store it because she had no room for it in her terraced house. Some years later, I was informed that I must house this precious mahogany albatross myself. After some handwringing and sadness, lack of space forced me to pass it on to someone in my village. She took one look and promptly vowed to ‘do an upcycle’.
Some boomers are resigned to the fact that the sale of brown furniture isn’t going to ‘fund any skiing holidays’
Such is the sorry fate of brown furniture. It is unwanted by millennials, who will likely inherit it anyway when their boomer parents inevitably downsize, to allow their offspring to scramble on to a much lower rung on the property ladder. Brown furniture strikes me as a peculiarly apt metaphor for the cumbersome, unwieldy process of the Great Wealth Transfer more broadly.
It may sound like a heist, but the Great Wealth Transfer is the anticipated handing down of approximately £5.5 trillion from the boomers to millennials, what journalists and financial analysts like to call (with no apparent irony) the ‘largest flow of generational capital ever seen in the history of humanity’. Maybe we should simply call it The Generation Game and get Bruce Forsyth back from the grave to officiate. Because like all game shows, there will be winners and losers. Just don’t expect a conveyer belt and a teddy bear.
But first, a word for the boomers. Britain’s baby boomers – the 13.5 million people, aged between about 60 and 80, who were born between 1946 and 1964 – grew up in a world of staggering growth. As they worked, they were able to pay into pensions and buy shares. Overwhelmingly, they bought houses, and these houses have become a lot more valuable: a flat bought in Notting ‘Grotting’ Hill in the 1970s for £6,000 is now worth well over £1 million. Half have more than £500,000 in assets and roughly a quarter have more than £1 million. This has helped make the boomers comfortably the richest generation there has ever been – and quite possibly the most reviled. As a geriatric millennial born in 1983, waiting for the wealth to trickle down into my hands, I can’t wait.
Except I don’t seem to be in line for any wealth as such, but a whole auctioneer’s catalogue of brown furniture given to me as property has changed hands from my grandmother’s so-called silent generation to my boomer mother, who now doesn’t want it (and has even been known to Farrow & Ball it). If I do inherit any property, it probably won’t be until I am well into my sixties, when my children have completed their (hopefully) private education. As I really don’t want my mother to croak it any time soon, I am at peace with this situation.
Through no meritocratic slaving of my own, I have managed to get on to the property ladder via my husband. The Bank of Mum and Dad regrettably never opened its ATM for me, as it did for so many of my peers, but hey-ho. What has trickled down to me thus far in the greatest asset swap of all time can be listed as follows: a Davenport desk, a couple of Pembroke tables, a side cabinet, a linen press, two gilt mirrors, a wig stand and a great deal of bone china, designed for the kind of entertaining that hasn’t taken place since the 1940s.
Brown furniture, then, is my lot. But brown furniture, as auctioneers are at pains to tell me, is worth nothing – it is the abject symbol of generational misalignment that will come to characterise the slow death march of the boomers and expose the Great Wealth Transfer once and for all. Blame Tony Blair – ‘forward not back’.
But why? Shouldn’t it be worth something? I spoke to Thomas Jenner-Fust, director of Chorley’s in the Cotswolds, to confirm just how shafted I am. Jenner-Fust blames ‘generational dissonance’ for having driven the value of brown furniture down: ‘Boomers came from a world where people still sat around a table to eat food, took afternoon tea (no ghastly mugs), sat at a desk to write letters with an actual pen and displayed their trinkets and treasures in display cabinets.’ In contrast, he says, millennials lead different lives in knocked-through kitchens where mahogany furniture looks out of place, and built-in cabinets throughout the house have done away with the need for hulking great bow-fronted chests of drawers. And of course many millennials don’t have a home at all to fill with brown furniture, even if they wanted to.
Some boomers, I quickly learn, are resigned to the fact that the sale of brown furniture isn’t going to ‘fund any skiing holidays’; ‘luckily for them, over the same period [35 years] their Old Rectories have gone up by millions so they can take a hit on the Pembroke tables’.
Others, upon discovering that their corner cupboard is worth only £30, are not so sanguine. ‘I have often felt that I am about to be chased out of the house with a rolling pin. I’m seen as a sort of swindler,’ confesses Jenner-Fust, letting slip that when an auctioneer acquaintance sells a piece of brown furniture for a pittance, he often remarks ‘at that price I hope the legs fall off’. Which of course, unlike their Ikea counterparts, they won’t. Brown furniture, like a boomer’s incredible life expectancy, is sturdy and built to last.
Eliza Filby, historian of generations and author of Inheritocracy,published last year, sees the glut of brown furniture as evidence of the fact that ‘boomers are the consumer generation that have bought a lot of shit’. By contrast, millennials and Gen Z are the experience generations, all holidays and Instagrammable ‘memory-making’.
Brown furniture, Filby says, is a motif not just for different ways of living but, crucially, for different economic standards of living, standards that were far more elevated than we victimised millennials could dare to imagine. ‘There’s a reason why millennials embraced the pared-down mid-century aesthetic,’ she notes. It is born out of economic and social dire straits rather than simply solipsism. Minimalism arose then because there was simply less space: no dining rooms, less wall space for gilt mirrors and linen presses – just less.
What, then, is the answer to this generation game of discontent? James Mabey, partner at law firm Winckworth Sherwood, tells me that, as with most things, tech may be the answer. Technology that can predict life expectancy may be ‘a very powerful tool in estate planning in choosing how much to give away and when, and how much we are each likely to need to keep back’.
The short-term risk, though, is that millennial inheritance gets drunk through a straw by boomers on their so-called ‘revenge holidays’. I conclude, in the words of the late, great Bruce Forsyth, that I must ‘play my cards right’. Just no more sideboards, please: I flogged the dinner service ages ago.
Why do my outfits make people so angry?
I have always cycled everywhere in London, not because I want to save the planet but because I want to get to my destination on time. I ride a big heavy Dutch woman’s bike: practical, less nickable and I can wear pretty much anything while riding it. On this occasion I was wearing frilly pink nursery-print dungarees, pink patent bootees, a sweet little jacket with puffy pale-blue bows down the front, a pink cloche hat and a pink-and-blue shiny PVC backpack. I was just locking my bike to the railings on Charing Cross Road when an angry man approached. ‘Are you a paedophile?’ he roared. ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ This is not the first time one of my outfits has elicited this kind of reaction and my initial proposed response is: ‘Having watched the news, paedophiles tend to look more like you than me.’ But this time I thought better of it and just replied: ‘I don’t think paedophiles tend to advertise.’ He stormed off.
Still on two wheels, I motorcycled over to Hay-on-Wye for the festival to do a presentation called ‘The Joy of Singing’ with my vocal coach Juliet Russell. I have worked with her for six years and, as someone who had never sung before, I have found our lessons to be emotional and revelatory. To sing well one has to make oneself very vulnerable. It took a year before I could sing in front of my wife. Juliet is very encouraging but also has to deliver tough feedback. Another of her pupils once praised her to me: ‘She serves the best shit sandwich in London.’
The beginning of June heralds the opening of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, an event which has been a fixture of the London season for more than 250 years. The preview party is always a glorious spectacle. The first time I attended I felt as if I were on an acid trip, overwhelmed by golden rooms swirling with colourful art and fashion. I always save my most paparazzi-friendly outfits for the occasion. This year I wore a cartoonish orange-and-yellow number with a giant blue nappy, purple wig, orange tights and my highest cerise flatforms. The event was very well attended but I thought a plague of chromophobia (fear of colour) had swept in. The artworks were as bonkers and bright as always, but a lot of the crowd looked as if they had just popped in from work – a sea of black, navy and grey. Dressing up for a party is like pimping your front garden: you don’t just do it for yourself, you dress up so everybody feels they are at a fun event, not a conference sponsored by LinkedIn.
Disappointment in someone’s dull attire can be a creative force. In 2005 I was on the number 38 bus dressed as a housewife in M&S when I bumped into a friend. Natalie Gibson, always a vision in popping colour, teaches fashion print at Central Saint Martins art school. She looked me up and down and said, ‘I think my students could do better than that.’ Over coffee we conceived the Make a Dress for Grayson Perry Project. So every year Natalie and I and the staff at CSM coax the students to design and make me an outfit featuring print. Over 20 years I have had more than 500 made for me and have probably bought about half of them. This year I decided would be the last. So the day of the final, final crit arrived. It is a joyous occasion. I model all the outfits and award trophies. Some of the students were not born when we started the course, and Natalie has taught there since 1964. The arts endure.
I was sad to hear of the death of Alan Yentob. My experience of him was always as a champion of the arts and the talent working behind as well as in front of the camera. He was someone I was always pleased to encounter for a funny chat at some arts do. He had an endearing/infuriating habit of incessant name-dropping and loved hanging out with what I call ‘cerebrities’. I once arrived early at some big arts event and immediately encountered Alan. We chatted and then he wandered off only to return ten minutes later. ‘Couldn’t you find anyone more famous to hang out with?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said.
The dangers of toxic femininity
The American critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has just published a new translation of The Odyssey. In his superb introduction, Mendelsohn also does something that many modern translators and critics avoid, which is to point to the oddness and different-ness of Homer’s world. For that and many other reasons, reading Mendelsohn’s fresh and clear translation was a counterweight to one of the great imperatives of our time: ‘Let us look at this long-ago thing only in order to see if it can shed any light on the glorious us and now.’
Everything is about ‘understanding’, ‘listening’, ‘speaking for’ and ‘alleviating’ the suffering of others
Yet a timeless work remains timeless both because we marvel at the different nature of the world described and because it occasionally tells us things we have forgotten.
Which brings me to the Sirens. Every schoolchild knows the story. Odysseus is warned by the goddess Circe of the challenges he will meet on the way home to Ithaca. Among them are the Sirens, whose cry is so beguiling that Odysseus must order his men to stop up their ears with wax as they row past. Odysseus himself must be tied to the mast as they navigate the waters so that while he alone can hear the Sirens, he will not encourage his men to row towards them.
Like everyone, I supposed I knew the story, but there is something in the clarity of Mendelsohn’s translation which brought a fresh thought to me.
The Sirens get only eight lines, but they are enough to make Odysseus risk everything and need tying even more firmly to his ship’s mast. I’d never given much thought before to why the song of the Sirens should be so beguiling. I think I imagined their song was merely beautiful, like Wagner’s Rhinemaidens. But there is something else. Here is how Mendelsohn renders their song:
O Odysseus, rich in praise, great glory of the Acheans,
Come hither now, halt your ship and hear the sound of our voice!
For no one has ever rowed past us aboard his black-hulled ship
Before he’s heard the voice from our lips with its honeyed harmonies,
But once he has taken his pleasure, he returns knowing so much more.
For well we know all the hardships that there, in Troy’s sprawling plains,
Both the Argives and the Trojans endured through the will of the gods.
And we know whatever happens on the earth, which nourishes all.
That’s it, but enough to make Odysseus lose his self-control. As I read it, I thought of several happenings on our own island.
This month parliament debated two pieces of society-changing legislation. One was the decision to extend the date at which women can terminate life in the womb. The other was legislation that means that from now on we may choose the day on which we die.
These are interesting priorities for a country. But the debates on extending abortion limits and the introduction of euthanasia came like a pincer movement. On the one hand a woman will be able to abort a child after six months of pregnancy. Meaning that a life that is viable out of the womb may be killed inside it. I happened to be with a friend this week who is six months pregnant, and was horrified that the child she and her husband were already caring for would be deemed good to abort in England and Wales. And while the proposer of the amendment, Tonia Antoniazzi MP, was content with simply allowing women to abort a baby at any point during pregnancy, Stella Creasy MP tried to use the opportunity to enshrine abortion at any stage as a ‘human right’.
At the other end of the life spectrum, MPs spent the same week voting – and approving – a bill to finally make euthanasia (or ‘assisted dying’) into another ‘human right’ in this country. Kim Leadbeater seems to have made it her life mission to retract our lives at the opposite end from Antoniazzi and Creasy. As I have said for many years, there is no country into which euthanasia has been introduced in which the slope from the arena of palliative care has not slipped into the killing of the mentally ill, the young and those who feel they have become a burden on their families or the state. And if anyone in this country thinks the state will be competent to decide who does or does not feel compelled to end their life, they should look at how easy it is just to get a GP appointment.
But never mind, because in all these cases the argument and rationale has each time been reduced to ‘compassion’ and ‘understanding’. Leadbeater and Creasy are masters at making speaking and emoting the same thing. Both present their moral arguments – such as they are – in a way in which their faces crumple and voices crack with empathy at all times. Everything is about ‘understanding’, ‘listening’, ‘speaking for’ and ‘alleviating’ the suffering of others.
Which brings me back to the Sirens. Because what is so compelling to Odysseus is that the Sirens’ song tells him that on their island, alone, he will be understood. The Sirens promise that they, uniquely, appreciate what he has been through at Troy. They will listen to him and understand him. He, for his part, will achieve one of the greatest of all human desires: to be understood.
At risk of making more enemies, let me point out that while we have heard plenty about ‘toxic masculinity’, there is also such a thing as ‘toxic femininity’. This includes the idea that we will be saved and our problems resolved by compassion and empathy, all other judgments and rationales being put to one side.
In recent days the meaning, depth and value of life in this country contracted at both ends. Not for any rational reason, but because if we did not we would be lacking understanding and kindness. But the calls are a mirage, and the promises a lie. We’ll see who hits the rocks first.
In defence of exorcism
Francis Pike has narrated this article for you to listen to.
British politics and ghosts are subjects that rarely meet. Sometimes an MP or parliamentary aide might report a sighting of one of various spirits that inhabit the Palace of Westminster. It is said, for instance, that the ghost of the assassin John Bellingham haunts the Commons lobby at the spot where he gunned down Spencer Perceval. And last year the diary secretary to speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle excited the tabloids with her claim that once, in one of parliament’s side rooms, she felt a phantom dog nuzzling against her leg.
When I bought a pied-à-terre in Kensington, I got the dowser to give it a psycho-spiritual once-over
In general, though, politicians aren’t preoccupied with the paranormal. One exception is David Bull, the former TV presenter of Most Haunted Live! and the new chairman of Reform UK. On Good Morning Britain earlier this month, he was asked by Richard Madeley whether he had ever seen a ghost. Not only did Bull admit to having driven with a ghost in the boot of his car, he also told how a poltergeist had taken hold of the celebrity medium, Derek Acorah, and tried to strangle him.
This story was retold the other week with sceptical merriment at The Spectator’s weekly editorial meeting. Feeling that I should intervene in support of the supernatural, I confessed to the editor and his crew that I once hired someone to perform an exorcism at my house in Maida Vale. Merriment turned to suspiciously demonic laughter.
What were the supernatural events that led to my experience with exorcism? I am a heavy sleeper, but even I was occasionally woken by the banging of doors on the second floor. But not as much as friends who had to sleep in the guest room. They also reported sudden chills and apparitions.
The man I turned to for help was not a priest but a dowser. He was a big cheese in the British Society of Dowsers. He was not at all ‘new age’; he looked and spoke like an accountant. He identified the spirit of a young girl crouching in the corner of the room and thought that she had probably been a prostitute. Villas built in Little Venice in the 19th century, often for mistresses, became brothels in the 1920s. The Warrington public house on Randolph Avenue, close by my home, was a famous house of ill repute. Some have suggested that the word ‘randy’ (lustful) derives from the location.
To release the ghost from her physic imprisonment, I was encouraged to knock a double door between two guest rooms at great expense. It worked. No more banging doors. I was so convinced by my dowser that when I later bought a pied-à-terre in Kensington Gardens Square, I got him to give it a psycho-spiritual once-over.
My account leaves one big unanswered question. Why did I believe so readily in the presence of a pesky ghost in my house? The answer is simple. I have previous experience of the supernatural. Some years earlier I was sitting in my apartment in Bombay when I was called to the telephone. A woman called Rita Rogers wanted to speak to me. She told me that my father, Frank, who had died some years earlier, was sending me a message. He wanted me to have his gold Rolex watch.
Not only had I never heard of Rita (who later became famous as the clairvoyant who gave advice to Princess Diana), nor she of me, but she could not have known about my father or his watch. I rang my mother, who told me that she had been meaning to give it to me. It was handed over. As communication from beyond the grave goes, it did make me wonder why my father had sent me such a humdrum message.
Despite my own supernatural experiences, I still find it difficult to take ghost stories seriously – even my own. As a historian and geopolitical analyst, I live in a world of facts, evidence and logic. When friends or acquaintances tell me about the time they saw a ghost, I pass it off as an amusing anecdote in which I only half-believe.
By contrast, for most of history society has taken this stuff very seriously. The best-known early account of exorcism took place at Gerasene, near the Sea of Galilee. Here Jesus met a lunatic possessed by demons (literally ‘unclean spirits’ in Greek) and asked his name. ‘My name is Legion, for we aremany.’ Legion begged Jesus to ‘send us among the pigs’. The demons were duly despatched into a nearby herd of pigs, which rushed into a lake and drowned.
But exorcism predates Christianity. In the first millennium bc, shamans in Mesopotamia called asipu performed exorcisms. The Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus recorded how a holy man called Eleazar called on King Solomon to draw demons out ofthe noses of victims. Meanwhile, demons in the Islamic world, jinn, have always been dealt with by exorcists called raqui.
In the West, the publication of De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam (‘Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications’) in 1614 defined the practice of exorcism until minor adjustments were made in Vatican II. These changes stressed the connection between exorcism and baptism. It’s a connection heavily emphasised in the Orthodox churches, which do exorcisms all the time. ‘At every baptism we spit on Satan – literally,’ one accomplished icon painter told me.
The practice of exorcism today is seen by some to be an archaic medieval hang-over. But Pope Francis in an interview warned against the ‘spiritual lukewarmness’ that left people open to ‘diabolical possession’. According to Vatican News, the demand for exorcisms in Italy has tripled in recent years and annual requests exceed half a million. Some attribute this to an increased use of recreational drugs and psychiatric disorders.
In Britain, exorcisms are carried out by specially trained priests – in the Church of England there are 42, one for each diocese. And although they don’t like to publicise it, NHS consultant psychiatrists have been known to work with exorcists (or ‘deliverance ministers’, as the C of E calls them) to treat patients with mental health problems.
The belief in ghosts is an important part of human history. And despite the sceptics, it still has a place in modern life. It would be a great subject for Reform’s new chairman to get his teeth into.
False moves
Right before the end of my game against Alexei Shirov at the World Rapid Team Championships earlier in June, I had the better side of a drawn position and a full 20 seconds to make a move. Not too bad: Shirov is a former member of the world elite, whose brilliant games I had revered since childhood, and a draw would secure us victory in the match. At that moment, my mind left the chessboard. It pondered the winning position I had earlier in the game. And it drifted back, yet again, to the middlegame, which reached the position in the diagram below, right after I, playing Black, had captured a knight on f5. In response to 23 Nxf5 I intended Qxb2!, when White must choose between 24 Rxg7+ and 24 Nxh6+, but in either case Black emerges from the skirmish with an extra knight.
What actually happened was this: Shirov picked up my knight on f5, and slowly, calmly, used it to capture my pawn on h6. That is not a chess move! Those are both my pieces! Realising his mistake, he apologised and put the pieces back before playing 23 Nxf5 Qxb2 24 Nxh6+. (Clearly, Shirov was ‘thinking ahead’ to his 24th move, and tried to execute it at move 23). After 24…Kh7 25 Re1 gxh6 26 Rge5 Nd7 27 R5e3 Qf6 I had a winning position. But I also had a persistent attack of the giggles. Shirov was tenacious, and my advantage dissipated.
An arbiter’s gesture interrupted my reverie. He pointed at my clock: I had lost the game on time. I put my head in my hands before conceding.
Shirov’s mishap had an element of fortune. The piece he picked up first – my knight on f5 – was the piece he intended to capture anyway, so the ‘touch-move’ rule (i.e. if you touch a piece, you have to move it, or capture it, if such a move is legal) did not interfere with his plans.
After the game, I learned of a similar incident at the 1980 Olympiad in Malta. Krum Georgiev, as White, had played a sparkling game against the future world champion Garry Kasparov. In the diagram, Kasparov’s bishop has just captured a pawn on e7 and everyone expects 21 Bg5xe7, with a winning endgame advantage for Georgiev. Instead, he made the bizarre and impossible move Be7xd6, presumably ‘thinking ahead’ in the sequence 21 Bxe7 Nbc6 22 Bxd6 (rather like Shirov). A lengthy dispute arose concerning whether Georgiev had first touched the d6-pawn or the e7-bishop. In Kasparov’s account, it was the the pawn, in which case the ‘touch-move’ rule would mandate the ludicrous move 21 Rxd6, which loses a rook. The arbiter eventually ruled in Georgiev’s favour. He played 21 Bxe7 and won the game 40 moves later.
No. 856
White to play. Maroroa Jones-Aronian, World Rapid Team Championship, London 2025. Aronian’s last move Nf6-e4 was a blunder. Which response prompted immediate resignation? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 30 June. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address.
Last week’s solution 1 Rh8+! If 1…Kxh8 2 Qg8 is mate. The game ended in a draw by repetition after 1…Qxh8 2 Qxe7+ Kh6 3 Qg5+ Kh7 4 Qe7+ etc.
Last week’s winner Ted Ditchburn, Monkseaton, Tyne and Wear
Spectator Competition: Who’s who?
For Competition 3405 you were invited to submit a scene in which Doctor Who has regenerated into someone very unexpected. Plenty of interesting transformations resulted, featuring among others Paddington Bear, Mary Berry and two Jacob Rees-Moggs, but the winners of the £25 vouchers are below.
The Doctor, regenerating as a tall, meaty-faced man in jeans, a plaid shirt and his mid-sixties, soon got clumsily busy for comic effect with screwdrivers, sonic and otherwise, setting about the Tardis console and causing Fleetwood Mac to play at excessive volume before sending us zagzigging erratically across spacetime on a far from grand tour. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ he bellowed, overemphasising every word in apparent exoneration of his haphazard driving skills. When finally we materialised, it was in a sodden wheat field near Chipping Norton and Daleks were massing. ‘I’ve seen off South Oxfordshire Council,’ The Doctor chuntered, ‘so this lot should be an absolute doddle.’ Utilising the element of surprise, The Doctor whipped off the top of each Dalek to reveal inside a startled, black-clad gay ballet dancer. They fled, The Doctor pursuing them for the damage they’d done to what turned out to be his durum wheat.
Adrian Fry
Jax watched helplessly from behind the containment field as The Doctor melted and reformed. She was astonished to see a middle-aged, portly, bald white man in a blue suit, with a mauve tie that overlapped his name tag on its lanyard. Only the letters ‘Ric H’ were visible. ‘Help, Doctor, get me out!’ she yelled.
‘Alas, Jax, a writ of habeas corpus does not run on Chagos. Although some Time Lords hold that Gallifreyan law is “grandfathered” from the colonial period, the better view is that, absent positive Xiblaxian law –’
‘Then use the sonic screwdriver!’
‘It’s a Level 5 quantum-electric emitter, not lic-ensed here, I’m afraid.’
‘But we have to stop the Xiblaxians invading Earth!’
‘Their not being signatories to the Galactic Sentient Rights Treaty, whereas Earth is, makes that intricately tricky.’
In desperation, Jax transformed herself into a co-elenterate and oozed through a gap in the field…
Frank Upton
The Tardis, looking strangely like a muddy Range Rover, came crashing Earthwards into an armour-strewn wheat field. Out stepped a man in red corduroy trousers and a chequered jacket. ‘All right, then, Ange,’ he said, ‘where are we?’ A flame-haired Deputy Time Lord in high-vis vest and golden training shoes read from her chart: ‘Well, Doctor –’
‘Hang about. Just call me Nige when the cameras aren’t watching. I’m so thirsty after all that warp speed stuff. Got a fag, by the way?’
‘Yiss, Nige, but they ’aven’t been invented yet. We’re in medieval France, right near’t’end o’t’Undred Years’ War wi’ England.’
‘Right, so we’ve got three immediate ishoos for this latest series. One, how do I introduce tobacco to 15th-century Europe? Two, at least one episode must be called “Daleks in Best Bitter Battle”. And three, why stop after only 100 years? This English/French stuff could run and run!’
Nicholas Lee
Regenerated, The Doctor proved a conservatively dressed, fogeyishly fastidious old Etonian whose preferred method of communication was the newspaper article. He immediately set about having the Tardis refurbished after the manner of a Georgian rectory, particularly concerned not to own a television, for all that he would be pursued across spacetime for a licence. Said Tardis, reliably unreliable, haphazardly materialised on alien worlds or at historical periods beset by extraterrestrial incursions unrecorded even in Macaulay. This new Doctor, rising above such nonsenses, tarried onlywhere anecdotes about Margaret Thatcher might be authenticated or country sports freely engaged in. If his forthright, witty arguments failed to convince the Daleks of the folly of authoritarianism, it can only have been that they did not number among his readers. His symposium in a disused quarry with Walter Bagehot and T.E. Utley on constitutional democracy will be published here, culminating in the traditional cliffhanger.
Russell Clifton
Their time had come at last. For millennia the Time Lords had thwarted the Daleks’ universe-conquering ambitions. Now the Lords were tired and predictable, their clock was running down. This time they had failed to find their human stooge. Ha! The invincible Daleks would rumble forwards, exterminating everything in their path.
Their Doctors had always been ridiculous figures – a hammy old man, a TV scarecrow, lots of boring white Englishmen. There was even a Scotch one. As for the woman and the black African! – woke Time Lords: what a joke! Things were hotting up on Planet Earth; the next encounter would be Armageddon for those feeble poseurs.
The familiar screeching sound approached, the Daleks awaited their moment of triumph. The door opened and a giant lettuce appeared, screaming, ‘I was right all along. We have ten years to save the West!’
Basil Ransome-Davies
The Tardis slowly stopped spinning, teeter–tottered for a moment, then fell on its side. The front door (now the roof) was pushed open and a portly middle–aged man awkwardly clambered out. He was wearing a dark blue suit and matching tie, charmingly paired with a bright yellow life-jacket. He ran his hands over himself, noting the bulging belly, balding pate and thick jowls. He looked horrified. ‘No,’ he gasped. ‘Surely not. Can I really have regenerated as… Ed Davey?’ At that moment a Dalek materialised, making vague robotic threats. Doctor Davey-Who fumbled in his jacket for his sonic screwdriver, dropped it, tripped over his trouser legs and fell in a pond where, bobbing gently, he felt grateful for his lifejacket. A passing canoeist tried to help. Doctor Davey-Who somehow upended the vessel and both men were now floundering. The Dalek, watching from the sidelines, said: ‘Ex…traordinary. What an idiot.’
Joseph Houlihan
No. 3408: Some like it hot
You are invited to submit a poem about heatwaves (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 9 July.
2709: Our set
The unclued lights are of a kind. One of them consists of two separate theme-words juxta-posed: one is of two words and two have to be paired. The letters in the red squares spell another theme-word and the letters in the yellowsquares can be arranged to form yet another (two-word) theme word.
Across
1 Realise she can be awkward (6)
11 Pedro’s ‘See you later’ makes Oates laugh (5,5)
14 Bravo, gents, maybe May’s first flower (5)
18 Sky lad mixed polyester resins (6)
19 Bristle at small letter (4)
22 38 with mould in relief (6)
24 Obtain oil that’s for cooking the chop? (9)
25 European birds in the housetops? (5)
26 Less convincing Debussy composition (2,3)
28 Will on trial around 10 a.m. (9)
30 One quarrelling with some unpopular guerrilla (6)
33 Lamb’s father ate duck on ramble (4)
36 Possibly seated and quite composed (6)
39 Gradually reduce silly oaf’s fee (4,3)
41 Rows bring crying, reportedly (5)
42 Lizard Vasco beheaded (5)
43 Weapon causing problem to Central Edinburgh (6,4)
45 Rock group with each secret runaway (6)
Down
1 Demands performances from the past, it appears (6)
2 Cadbury import raised in BOAC accident (5)
3 Unfriendly US spies invading Laos on manoeuvres (7)
4 Mist conceals last bits of deciduous trees (6)
5 Records keeper at the reception desk (5)
7 On board help, we hear, for the 2020s, say (6)
9 Musician Holland suggests gemstones (5)
10 Breaks for readers of Butterflies (6)
12 Early telegraphic transmitter could possibly plan course (7,3)
16 I ban 30 Across organising old forfeit (3-7)
23 Soldiers surrounding a base (4)
27 Muse of ill repute, note (7)
30 Acid recluse shuns society (6)
31 Disprove arbiter on Aussie truck (6)
32 Birthplace of firm (6)
34 Doctor musical material (6)
35 Cockney fellow’s present at French département (5)
37 Let everyone scream (5)
38 Terence or Penny Black (5)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 14 July. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2709, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.
2706: Pitched – solution
The unclued lights are fielding positions in cricket.
First prize Gillian Ollerenshaw, Altrincham, Cheshire
Runners-up Richard Thorpe, Burntwood, Staffordshire; Fran Morrison, London SW15
‘Too bohemian for Bournemouth’: the young Lawrence Durrell
These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family’s prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV’s series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication of that pleasant teatime diversion’s accuracy: the actor playing Larry, Josh O’Connor, is 6ft 2in. Larry himself was a whole foot shorter.) How Louisa Durrell, struggling with life in Britain after returning from India, went in a bundle with her children to a Greek island of cheap Venetian mansions, heat and innocent adventure is always going to have its appeal.
What the Corfu idyll leaves out is why we should be interested in the story in the first place. Lawrence Durrell was a very good novelist, and this episode was only one of many that contributed to his work. That probably needs saying, since he is out of fashion today for a number of reasons. One is that his books, full of extravagant evocations of exotic places and pleasures, no doubt appealed to a British readership in the 1950s that was starved of such things. But how do the delights of Corfu, or indeed Alexandria, stand up when any of us can hop on a plane and sample them for ourselves?
A second reason is connected: Durrell’s literary style is undoubtedly baroque, his concept of a novel’s structure sometimes baffling (especially in the late Avignon Quintet) and in general open to accusations of over-indulgence. I read the Alexandria Quartet recently for the first time since I was at school, and was surprised by how well it had survived – a steely, bloodthirsty thriller of betrayal, deals and gun-running coagulating out of innocent romantic delusion. Individual episodes, such as the duck shoot in Justine, are wonderfully exciting; and the prose, which I had expected to find overblown, can be startlingly close to the Martin Amis of the 1980s:
Melissa’s dressing-room was an evil-smelling cubicle full of the coiled pipes that emptied the lavatories. She had a single poignant strip of cracked mirror and a little shelf, dressed with the kind of white paper upon which wedding cakes are built. Here she always set out the jumble of powders and crayons which she misused so fearfully.
A further reason for Durrell’s unfashionableness is, of course, precisely the biographical expansion, and not just the Corfu fantasy. Sappho, his daughter from his second marriage, set down in her diary details of her sexual abuse by him before committing suicide, just as his character Livia, based on Sappho, had been described as doing. These things can destroy a novelist’s reputation.
For the moment, his story is still worth telling, and although this is not the first or most important biography, it has a strong appeal – which is partly accidental. Michael Haag, who had already written books about Alexandria and the Corfu episode, was at work on a full biography when he died in 2020. This turned out to be complete up till the end of the war, with Durrell only just starting on what would be Justine. Profile Books has decided to publish it as it stands, which in fact is an alluring decision. What we have is that most interesting approach of literary biographies – the formative years before fame.
The heady society of wartime Egypt, and the sense of being at the centre of things, changed Larry fundamentally
Durrell hardly ever lived in Britain, and indeed in later years the question sometimes arose of whether he was a British citizen at all. He was born in India in 1912, the son of a brilliant engineer (the wonderful loop at the top of the great Darjeeling railway is his father’s work). Some memories of Indian life must have fed into the grotesquery he was capable of as a novelist. When his sister was bitten by her pet spaniel, rabies terrors meant that they had to carry the dog’s severed head in a canister on a long train journey to be tested. The family was not quite Raj top-drawer, but Durrell was nevertheless sent back to school in England, and lived with his returning mother in a succession of inappropriately ostentatious houses.
Aged 19, he was told by her that he was too much for Bournemouth. ‘You can be as bohemian as you like, but not in the house. I think you had better go somewhere where it doesn’t show so much,’ she said. A brief and raucous Bloomsbury period followed; a noisy marriage; and then the celebrated decampment en masse to Corfu. It was not quite as idyllic in all respects as it has been painted. The young Durrells’ enthusiasm for nude sunbathing with each other and visiting friends of both sexes (startlingly documented here in photographs) was one thing the Corfiots jibbed at.
The decisive period, however, to which Haag devotes most space, was 1940s Egypt. At the outbreak of hostilities, Durrell had been evacuated with his wife Nancy and infant daughter Penelope Berengaria from Kalamata in the Peloponnese. The experience of war in Egypt was tumultuous, and the mix of different cultures, officialdom, idealists, high society and bohemian life is exactly what makes the Alexandria Quartet so enthralling. The Durrells’ marriage broke down and Nancy departed in 1942.It is hard not to conclude that the war, the heady experience of grand café society and the sense of being at the centre of things had changed Larry fundamentally. Soon he was in a tempestuous relationship with the unstable Eve, who became his second wife and ultimately the disturbing Melissa of the Quartet.
As captivating as this novel sequence is, it shows (as Haag frankly admits) that Durrell’s experiences did not quite equip him to write about the political situation. It has always been agreed that it would have been impossible for his character Nessim, a Copt, to have been a gun-runner for Zionists in Palestine. Durrell decided to make him one because he was irresistibly drawn to the idea that, alone in the drama, Nessim would have wanted to marry the Jewish Justine out of calculation rather than passion. Though it reveals the limits of what Durrell could accept about the time and place he lived in, the Quartet has its own reality. What he observed turns into a compelling statement, made of smoke and steel. It ought to return to fashion in time.
Haag’s book is highly readable and elegantly put together, and, if unintentionally, produces a satisfying whole by stopping where it does. In fact, I suspect that the second half of Durrell’s life, especially the late years – full of tragedy, bad conduct and an undeniable decline in talent and readability – would not be as enjoyable an experience. We end with him returning to his beloved Greece after the war and starting to work on Justine, a book which hit the British reading public in 1957 at exactly the right moment.
A full biography, on the other hand, would have to include Sappho’s suicide; the dismal and incomprehensible final volumes of the Avignon Quintet (the last of which Faber returned to be revised, so little impressed were they); and Durrell’s death in 1990, before the French state could seize his property for non-payment of taxes. I met him briefly in London in 1983; the strange thing now is that I have absolutely no impression of his being as short as he actually was. His presence was immense.
Though this is a good biography, I have a request of publishers in general. Lawrence Durrell has been done often, and very respectably. In the course of Haag’s descriptions of life at the British Embassy and British Council in wartime Egypt, the name of Robert Liddell comes up. Liddell was also a seriously good novelist, and one who often appears as the adviser and friend of writers such as Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett. His story – he was abused as a child, abandoned England after the death of his beloved brother, and lived in Egypt and Greece – could be gripping. Might a publisher, for once, commission not a life we’ve heard several times but one of this remarkable but still strangely neglected novelist?
A life among movie stars can damage your health
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery
images…
So wrote Frank O’Hara in ‘Ave Maria’, in 1964.
Matthew Specktor is the son of the talent agent Fred Specktor and the writer Katherine McGaffey, whose crushing misadventures in screenwriting seem to him a detour in what could have been a far happier life. His father’s specialism was originally ‘oddballs and misfits’, carting around actors like Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern to no-hope castings where even Nicholson’s wolfish smile seemed wrong. But film-making was changing fast, away from conventional matinée idols into its golden age of humanist complexity on screen: men and women whose unusual faces, films and personal myths still fascinate us today.
As a teenager in the shabby Santa Monica of the late 1970s, Specktor stays out all night watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. When he rolls in with the dawn, his mother asks if he’s revised for his test, but also joins in with quoting the script back at him on her way to wrestle with the typewriter at the bottom of the garden. There is no chance of him not being allowed to go to the movies; but will he be able to escape them too? When he has a summer job in the mailroom at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), there’s advice from Dustin Hoffman, who’s using a spare office and with whom he shares cigarette breaks. Along with the smoking, Hoffman quips that working at this powerhouse will also be ‘bad for your health’. Specktor writes:
Is it? This is what I will never understand. Are the movies bad for me – so much dreaming – or are they life itself? I’ll spend the rest of my life brushing up against those people who haunt other people, crowding the margins of their dreams… I’ll never know what it means to have the movies at my mercy, to be Hollywood’s biggest star, but I’ll also never know what it’s like to be without them, now that they have colonised my imagination like a swarm of bees.
In a book that is part Hollywood history, part nuanced family memoir, the faultlines in his parents’ marriage are visible from the start. In 1963, even California is stifling. Sex is furtive and marriage proposals are made on the flimsiest grounds. Fred is a young assistant, the bullying of his working-class father having been replaced by the ‘scary’ Lew Wasserman, who makes being a marine feel like a gentle memory. The intellectual, beautiful woman with whom he falls in love is working, inevitably, as someone’s secretary, with great literature falling out of her handbag.
He will wonder that she is a person of enormous potential, someone who wouldn’t necessarily have to waste her life in the movie business. For him, this industry is an escape. For her, it could be slumming.
She carries around a copy of Ulysses. ‘Who are you going to impress?’ asks Fred. ‘Most people here don’t know James Joyce from the guy who wrote From Here to Eternity.’ What a line. For the deal-maker, Los Angeles makes life shinier. For the complicated artist, it’s an identity crisis waiting to happen. But without their uneasy love story their son wouldn’t be here to tell it.
Specktor has written authoritatively about the film industry in both fiction and criticism, but this is the first time he’s created a history that’s confessional as well as deeply researched. The combination, along with his gift for setting a scene, makes this his best book yet. While we can imagine the strangeness of being a star, The Golden Hour explores the strangeness of being ordinary in this extraordinary world, ‘impatient with a life that is merely human-sized’. As a son, as an artist himself and as a former development executive seeing the way literature is used up like so much coal, Specktor knows the film industry to be relentlessly careless of a writer’s dreams. (F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood was one of the casualties perceptively explored in Specktor’s book of essays Always Crashing in the Same Car.) In his family’s tragedy, McGaffey, who died in 2009, didn’t get enough of her second act either. His grief is as much for the life she might have had, and for all of the books she might have written, as for her loss.
Fred is now 92 and, extraordinarily, is still working at CAA as their longest standing agent, whose clients include Helen Mirren, Danny Devito, Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. After years of pursuing Morgan Freeman, he celebrated eventually signing him with a homage ear piercing, aged 73, and remains in what his son terms his ‘eternal present’, like a basketball player who has never left the court.
In this bizarre world the boundaries between life and art might seem extremely porous, but film has always been able to get under the skin and into the soul. It remains an intoxicating form, still able to inspire hysteria from politicians who have always appreciated its power. The lights remain hopefully on, even if the golden hour is probably past.
A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed
‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought.
In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of the story is told, this strangeness starts with the Mansfield sisters, five orphaned girls leading a reclusive life on a farm across the river, in the sole care of their blind grandfather, John. The girls’ free manners, in flippant disregard of the era’s orthodoxies, fill onlookers with mistrust.
To us, however, the sisters are simply girls being girls, and the strangeness rather stems from the villagers’ outdated mindset. The ferryman, Pete, resents the sisters for their lack of meekness and, even more humiliatingly, for afflicting him with ‘unclean thoughts’. But, it is implied, he also blames them for his other grievances, from the heat-guzzled river – which the villagers will soon be able to cross by foot, making his services superfluous – to his impending wedding to a woman he dislikes. In the words of Thomas, John Mansfield’s young farmhand, the sisters are held ‘responsible for a lot of things’. Pete’s obsession festers and mounts, until one night he claims to have spotted the girls turn into feral dogs. The rumour spreads like wildfire and the villagers close ranks.
Such a reversal of logic – by which the true horror resides not in the possibility that a girl might shapeshift into a rabid hound, but in the villagers’ consensus that self-reliant women have got to have something wrong with them – is trumpeted in the blurb: ‘It is safer to be a wild animal than an unconventional young woman.’ It’s a valid point, but it’s been brought home in witch-hunty books so often that it now feels a bit tired.
Purvis, who was inspired by a ‘real case of five barking girls’, does an excellent job of sketching swampy settings and folk-gothic atmospheres. For Temperance’s development alone, from prim bystander to a freethinking agent with a dark inner life (see her awakening to the fiendish temptation of alcohol, the poison that killed her father), the novel is worth reading.
And it’s a safe bet: you know what the characters are getting into from the first page, and the summer publication is also auspicious. The Hounding is the perfect holiday book.
What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition
We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its infamous breakup happening in August 1947. It’s a story told and filmed so often, and whose echoes reverberate today with such nuclear sabre-rattling that surely there is little left to add. And please nobody mention Edwina Mountbatten’s possible affair with Jawaharlal Nehru ever again.
How could the British be so capable of running an empire but so hopeless when it came to dividing it?
But there is a wider, and fascinating, history which has itself been partitioned off and ignored. We forget that more than a quarter of the world’s population was ruled by the Viceroy from New Delhi, in a zone that spread from the Red Sea to the borders of Thailand – an empire within an empire, which included Burma, parts of Yemen and Gulf states such as Dubai.
The division of this single and much larger British ‘Indian Empire’ created almost all of the conflicts that plague Asia today. These include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, the ongoing insurgencies in Baluchistan and north-east India, the Iranian revolution, the rise of the Taliban and the Rohingya genocide. It was high time that these wider divisions should have been examined in detail, and Sam Dalrymple does so in some style. Shattered Lands has a huge range, and the material is deftly handled to describe how a single, sprawling dominion, using the Indian rupee throughout, became 12 modern nations.
Burma (as it then was) is particularly fascinating, as Dalrymple upends the common assumption that somehow there was a natural frontier between that country and India which was just waiting to be restored. Far from it. When the Simon Commission arrived in 1928 – with the young Clement Attlee as a junior member 20 years before he oversaw actual Indian independence – it was tasked with making proposals about the colonies’ futures. It found that the idea of separating off Burma met with huge opposition – from the Burmese themselves, many of whom were concerned that without India their thriving economy would fail. The most senior politician, U Ottama, a disciple of Gandhi, argued that Burma was an integral part of the Indian nation.
Gandhi himself was more equivocal – not least because he was already drawn to the idea of recreating Bharat, the Hindu Holy Land of the ancient Mahabarata epic. This was to make him a far more divisive figure in India than the West often allows; and neither Burma nor Arab states such as Dubai could be any part of that.
Nor, of course, could a significant Muslim presence. Dalrymple is excellent on how Gandhi (‘cosplaying as a sadhu’) and his follower Nehru exploited the fact that for personal reasons the Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah took his eye off an inswinger ball at a crucial moment; and how the ‘Nehru Report’ could suggest dispensing with separate electorates for Muslims or reserved seats in parliament, a crucial requirement for a more unified nation.
Those personal reasons are also moving. The tall, patrician figure of Jinnah, known for his reserve and serious approach as a barrister and politician, fell deeply in love in 1918, aged 42, with Ruttie Petit, the 18-year-old daughter of a Parsi baronet. Sir Dinshaw Petit was not amused and put Jinnah in the dock, alleging abduction. The case failed; but so did the marriage, and Ruttie soon became a sad, drug-dependent casualty who died, aged 29, leaving Jinnah a shadow of his former self.
Jinnah, not Gandhi, comes across in this account as the politician most concerned at an early stage to have a secular India where the two majority faiths could live together; and a larger India to include Burma, so as to further leaven a multi-faith state.
Dalrymple tells the subsequent story of the Japanese invasion of Burma (woefully unforeseen by the British) and the exodus by its Indian inhabitants. There is a brilliant mix of narrative history with moving personal accounts of those who took part in what was a long, gruelling march through the jungle.
If there is one common theme that emerges from his description of the further partitions that followed, it is the cack-handed and casual way many British colonial officers drew border lines on the map for ‘administrative convenience’. These arbitrary divisions were to cause generational conflicts – including in Afghanistan, with the division of the Pathans from Pakistan, and the current conflicts in Myanmar with the Rohingya.
What is it about the British temperament that made us so capable of running an empire but so hopeless when it came to dividing it? A lack of emotional intelligence and empathy? Our habit of compromise might be admirable for day-to-day administration but is less useful for the building of new nations, when what was needed were clean lines not fudged ones. The shards left from such clumsy partitions in southern Asia are still drawing blood.
This is a book full of what-ifs and how it could all have gone a different way. At one point just before ‘the Great Partition’, the tantalising idea of a federal India emerged, supported by Jinnah. This would have been on the model of the United Kingdom, in which Pakistan and India would have coexisted; and would have done so alongside other states, such as the Gulf ones. At the time considered deserts and of no value, these would later have wielded such oil riches as to make ‘United India’ a dominant economic power in the world. Instead, Mountbatten pressed the button on full partition and allowed only ten weeks to prepare for it (‘Everyone will be shocked into action’), with disastrous consequences: at least a million deaths, at a conservative estimate, in the Punjab alone.
Dalrymple delivers his account at pace and with a keen eye for the telling detail. The ambition for what is his first book is impressive, and there is an admirably inclusive set of maps for those who don’t know their Srinagars from their Sri Lankas. It’s quite something for an author to claim that he has conducted his interviews in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. This is a book that combines scholarship with a flair for narrative story-telling of the highest order. And the story of India’s ‘other partitions’ has remained untold for too long.