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In praise of immersive exhibitions
‘Immersive’ exhibitions get a bad rap. And it’s not hard to see why. But if, like me, you find yourself hard-pressed to concentrate on Important Art when troubled by the cares and complexities of life, then digitally amplified sensation and spectacle might be a decent alternative if your museal itch needs scratching in stressful times.
There are two notable options in London right now. The first is Vogue: Inventing the Runway, at the Lightroom in King’s Cross. Drawing on Vogue‘s nearly 150 year old archive, it’s a show about the catwalk’s flashpoints, narrated by Cate Blanchett.
For those who missed the wildly popular and – I hate to admit it – helplessly enjoyable Hockney show at this new centre for immersion, the Lightroom is a vast chamber, in which you have minimalist boxes as seating and a visual and aural narrative presented in a gigantic way all around you.
With this show, I felt dazzled and very old. I could not keep up. I felt I was stuck in the bowels of TikTok. With no fewer than 60 designers included, it was catwalk after catwalk after catwalk. Blanchett’s descriptions were mostly one sentence or less. Here were the 1980s. Here was 2020. Here was 1996. Here was Patrick Kelly, the first American – and African-American – to be admitted to the governing body of the ready-to-wear industry. Here was Azzadine Alaia seen in a black and white snap in his Paris flat at… some point. Here was Karl Lagerfield using the Great Wall of China as the backdrop to a Fendi show in 2007 (I loved this).
There is very little history here. You get the odd blink-and-you-miss-it grainy snapshot of the prewar fashion show, when they were for clients, not media and celebrities. Why is Vogue afraid of the richness of the past it helped shape?
But it’s still pleasurable to sit there and watch beautiful people parading to loud, clubby tunes. And you’ll either be amused or depressed by the sheer frivolity of the runway world, as there is nothing money won’t be liberated for in the service of this pursuit. I watched delightedly as Karl Lagerfeld displayed Chanel’s clout in 2017 with a big, camp, life-size rocket which, emblazoned with the big CCs, fired up and rose to the top of the Grand Palais. It was also impressive to see the stars align for Pharrell Williams’s 2023 Pont Neuf show for Louis Vuitton. Billions tuned in to watch.
In the end, you are not immersed in any ‘story’, but instead swamped by a parade of jump cuts. This is a show for people all too used to the rhythms of social media. It was repetitious and right-on. Yet it was a nice enough way to glimpse insidery bits of a world that feels forever out of reach but is still fascinating, even to the sartorially hopeless among us.
Bubble Planet: An Immersive Experience, meanwhile, which turned out to be subtly substantial, rather mournful, and replete with much science and history. ‘Of the many forms existing in nature, it seems obvious that the world’s systems prefer the sphere,’ read one caption. We journeyed through the history of celestial bodies and the physics of soap bubbles, from surface tension to molecular behaviour.
In tandem with this dense signage were a series of rooms – in pastel hues – featuring balloons, bubbles, balls and sometimes just surreal screens showing otherworldly cityscapes. I brought my baby and for both of us, the swimming pool filled with little clear white balls and studded with oversized inflatable figures was particularly gratifying. My back hurt and I could sink amid the plastic lather, baby safe and amused. In one room, a robotic arm prepared and blew bubbles.
Neither immersions are cheap, and it’s hardly high-brow stuff but both offer temporary respite from life’s woes.
Why Britons can’t stop stealing
We were once known as a nation of shopkeepers. We are now a nation of shoplifters. As the Times reported last week, citing two recent reports from criminologists, ‘Britain is an increasingly dishonest society’, where ‘stealing from self-service supermarket check-outs has almost become a national sport.’
It didn’t need academics to tell us what we already know, what we’ve read repeatedly in the newspapers, and what we’ve seen before our very eyes: theft has become commonplace and normalised. But we should still ask ourselves why.
Many factors are at play. The long-term, steady retreat of the police from the streets, an allied decline in civic pride and trust in society, the (correct) belief among would-be criminals that they won’t be prosecuted, and the lockdowns of 2020-21, which lead to a rise in dysfunctional and antisocial behaviour. But one cannot discount another deceptively banal factor: the rise in self-service check-outs themselves.
The lockdowns had appalling psychological consequences
It’s not merely that customers can be absent-minded when using them. Most of us have mistakenly taken something without paying for it. A more pressing problem today, however, is the type of person who is ‘forgetful on purpose’, so to speak. Professor Emmeline Taylor, a criminologist at City, University of London, has coined a term for the type: ‘swiper’, an acronym standing for ‘seemingly well-intentioned patrons in regular’ shoplifting. ‘Shop theft used to be a grubby sort of crime,’ says Professor Taylor. ‘Now you have people joking about the latest thing they have stolen – how they “accidentally” put a bottle of prosecco through, disguised as a bunch of bananas.’
I have never stolen anything ‘accidentally-on-purpose’, but I can understand the type who does. First, on a base level, people feel it unfair that they should perform the job others are paid to do, and if they must perform the labour themselves, they should at least sometimes receive some payment for it in kind.
But there could be a more retributive and vengeful instinct afoot. Many see mechanised tills as symbols of incivility and rudeness, a hostile declaration by supermarkets that they don’t like people: staff or customers. They encapsulate a corporate worldview that dismisses human beings as mere means of production or units of consumption.
People are starting to hate supermarket chains for the same reason they now hate the high street banks who have blithely closed down their branches in recent years. It emerged on Monday that Santander is considering leaving the UK. Supermarkets and banks refuse to deal with us face to face any more, preferring instead obedient robots. It’s also why many people aren’t happy to see ticket offices closed down at railway stations.
This is not to excuse shoplifting, but to understand one reason for it. Like public toilets, self-service tills are liked by some and loved by none. This is why the likes of Asda and Morrisons last year began to make noises about changing their strategy on the matter.
The self-service till represents not only the dehumanised shopping experience – seen on a grander scale with the shift to online shopping – but the dehumanisation of society more fundamentally. Life is itself no-longer experienced in the fleshy, embodied world, but in the virtual one. The lockdown years, when we were cut off from bodily contact with other human beings, were so awful for so many for this very reason. Virtual interaction online embedded further the fallacy that humans consist of mind and detachable body, rather than bodies with a mind (to paraphrase the existential philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
The lockdowns had such appalling psychological consequences for this reason. This is why those who experienced them in their formative years don’t know how to deal with people in the real world, why society has become dysfunctional and lawless. That many were already enslaved to the virtual world has only compounded problems.
Social media trends have encouraged criminality, with TikTok clips sharing tips on how to steal from retailers. As David Shepherd, a criminologist at the University of Portsmouth, told the Times: ‘We have young people being exposed to attitudes which normalise everyday dishonesty and everyday cheating.’
We already know that dehumanisation is intrinsic to mindset of the thief. ‘A victimless crime’ – so goes the eternal cant of the shoplifter, seeking to convince others and convince himself that he has harmed no-one. The very concept of ‘restorative justice’, in which the perpetrator of a crime meets his victim, is founded on the idea that a criminal must learn and understand that his victim was a human being like him.
Thanks to social media, online shopping and self-service tills, we no longer recognise others as humans like ourselves. The rush by supermarkets to embrace automation makes only more acute a feeling of alienation, indifference and hostility. It’s no wonder that some libertines respond in kind with their own acts of inhumanity and incivility.
Rachel Reeves’ tinkering won’t rescue Britain’s economy
The news just seems to get worse for Rachel Reeves. After the slight relief of last week’s inflation and GDP figures, this morning brings headlines that are even grimmer than economists expected. The government was forced to borrow £17.8 billion in December, more than twice the £6.7 billion which Rishi Sunak’s government borrowed in December 2023. In just one month, taxpayers had to spend £8.3 billion to service the government’s debt. Interest payments are now consuming over 8 per cent of government expenditure – more than is spent on education or defence – and very nearly as much as the welfare bill, which is itself ballooning.
The Chancellor's immediate problem is that most of her tax rises – in particular the rise in employers’ National Insurance Contributions (NICs) – don’t take effect until April. Spending increases on public sector wages, however, have very much taken effect, especially as some deals involved backpay. How much extra revenue she will receive once NICs are raised is far from certain, however. Yesterday’s slight rise in unemployment suggests that employers may already be restricting hiring in preparation for higher tax bills. If businesses continue to shed staff it will hit the public finances with a triple whammy: not only could revenue from NICs fall, but tax revenues from employees will drop and the benefits bill will rise. Reeves is pushing against an invisible barrier: there is, inevitably, as per the Laffer curve, a point beyond which a government will struggle to raise extra revenue, even if it jacks up tax rates because those tax rises will disincentivise economic activity. It is hard not to wonder whether Britain has reached that point.
Tempting though it might be to lay the blame for December’s appalling public borrowing figures at Labour's door, the problem goes back far further. No government of any colour has succeeded in balancing the books in 22 years. Instead, each carried on piling up debt during good times and bad – in spite of charges of ‘austerity’. They convinced themselves, as per Modern Monetary Theory, that spending more money would generate extra economic growth which would, in turn, help boost revenues. It didn’t. All it has achieved is to switch spending from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector. Not only is debt sky-high, but productivity growth is on the floor, trapping the public finances into an increasingly unsustainable position.
Reeves has reportedly asked departments for five per cent spending cuts. She will do well to achieve that, given Labour’s tax and spend culture – does she really think that ministers will be onside for that project? Moreover, last year’s pay awards for the public sector have whetted the unions’ appetite for more. Not only that, the Prime Minister seems determined to spend money where he doesn’t even need to: such as on rent to Mauritius for the privilege of continuing to use an air force base in a British overseas territory.
Tinkering around with spending is not going to be enough. Sooner or later, Britain is going to need a Prime Minister in the mould of Argentine president Javier Milei, who is prepared to take a metaphorical chainsaw to public spending. Bond markets have already sounded a warning. Their cries are only going to get louder.
Donald Trump is a president in a hurry
“The First Hundred Days” was the iconic phrase for Franklin Roosevelt’s rapid-fire acts as the new president. Donald Trump intends to top that with “The First Hundred Hours.” Three months is far too slow for the new president. He made that clear by signing some 200 executive orders on his first day back in office.
The media has focused on the substance of those orders, and understandably so. But their substantive content, on the border, birthright citizenship, DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) and more, is only half the story. The other half is the swift, decisive process. Trump had those orders prepared during the weeks between his election in early November and his inauguration in late January. He means to act and to act fast.
The next Democratic president can reverse all his orders, a point Trump demonstrated when he did just that to Biden’s orders
Trump’s readiness to make specific policy decisions serves several purposes. It shows America and the entrenched powers in Washington that Trump knows exactly what he wants to accomplish, not just in broad terms but in detail. It shows he is determined to act swiftly and that he’s the new sheriff in town. The days of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and their arteriosclerotic party are dead and gone, replaced by a new administration, filled with senior aides at the White House and federal agencies who will back Trump’s agenda, not their own. Trump is hell bent on jerking back control of the government from the unelected bureaucrats who have run it for decades and are closely aligned with the Democratic Party. He ran on that platform, so he can claim a popular mandate for it.
Trump’s agenda isn’t new. He had the same one in this first term. What’s different this time is that he knows a lot more about how to achieve it. He showed it with his rapid selection of cabinet picks and their key subordinates, as well as the detailed executive orders ready for his signature.
Trump learned the hard way that he needs loyalty from his aides and cabinet picks. He cannot enact his policies without it. That’s a crucial lesson from the first term, perhaps the crucial one. His first term agenda was blocked by congressional Democrats, legacy media, his aides and appointees with their own separate agendas (and media contacts to help them), anonymous bureaucrats and stealthy opponents in the CIA, FBI and Department of Justice. Many continued to harass him with lawfare after he left office.
Those days are over. Trump has staged the biggest comeback in American political history, and he is determined to capitalise on it. That is the message Trump is sending with his avalanche of executive orders. “I’m back. I’m in charge. I know what I want to do. I know who will try to stop me, and I’m determined to expose and defeat them. And I know I need to act quickly if I want to accomplish big things.”
Fast action is essential because Trump’s political capital is limited in two crucial ways. First, it won’t last long. In Washington, political capital fades quickly. Use it or lose it. Second, although Trump won the Electoral College, all the swing states and the popular vote, he has only a tiny, fragile majority in the House of Representatives. That narrow margin gives any small group of Republican holdouts enormous negotiating leverage. That’s one reason Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson moved quickly to strip libertarian Representative Thomas Massie from all committee assignments and Representative Mike Turner from his powerful chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee. They didn’t just want to eliminate any internal opposition from those two. They wanted to signal to all other Republicans that it is very costly to oppose the president and that Mike Johnson will do his bidding in the House.
What about congressional Democrats? Can Trump and Johnson count on help from them? Not much. They will receive sporadic support on popular issues, mostly from centrist Democrats in districts Trump carried. Republicans will be helped by the Democrats’ disunity, too. The party is torn over whether to adhere to progressive policies or move back to the center. They have no coherent leadership to steer them.
The Democrats are in shambles but Trump cannot count on their divisions for success
The Democrats’ lack of leadership was apparent in the scattershot questioning of Trump’s cabinet picks before Senate committee. The smart move would have been to focus on areas that already divide Republicans. Instead, they tossed out questions on whatever interested them, only to be squashed by tough-minded nominees like Pam Bondi (for attorney general).
Of course, Democrats do have congressional leaders: Hakeem Jeffries in the House, Chuck Schumer in the Senate. But those are “inside-Washington leaders” without national heft. (The same is true for Republican leaders in Congress.)
Democrats won’t have a true national leader until they choose a presidential candidate in 2028. The old leadership — Obama, Pelosi, Bill and Hillary — have been discredited and cannot lead the party forward. No one even mentions Kamala Harris. As for Joe Biden, his dismal poll numbers crashed to new lows after his disgraceful pardons for family members and imprisoned cop killers. He leaves office with Spiro Agnew’s reputation for integrity and Mr. Magoo’s for mental sharpness.
These problems in the Democratic Party are a major reason Trump was elected. He received a lot of votes for his own agenda and charisma, of course, but he received plenty because he was not Joe Biden and not Kamala Harris. He was not seen as leading a party that had few new ideas beyond spending lots of money, backing public-sector unions, telling the country to buy electric cars, appeasing Iran, and spending billions in Ukraine.
True, the fading remnants of the Mainstream Media still loved that world and reviled Trump’s populism, but they are a dying remnant, like the politicians and policies they supported. Their party had run out of ideas and lost its electoral foundation among the middle class, especially industrial workers. The legacy media lost out to new technologies, which Trump embraced in his winning campaign. The Democrats misread that technological change and, in any case, lacked a candidate who could last three hours on Joe Rogan. Joe Biden could hardly read his brief valedictory address from the Oval Office. Kamala Harris couldn’t improvise the greeting on a Hallmark card.
The Democrats are in shambles, then, but Trump cannot count on their divisions for success. He has to act fast and choose his legislative priorities carefully. His executive orders, important as they are, are not enough. They can’t be used to pass the budget, raise the debt ceiling or lock-in policies beyond his tenure in office. The next Democratic president can reverse all his orders, a point Trump demonstrated when he did just that to Biden’s orders.
Buckle up for a fast, bumpy ride. Trump knows how rapidly his political capital will fade. That’s why he is acting even more rapidly and decisively than Roosevelt did during his first 100 days. That’s the message he sent by signing all those executive orders. That’s the message of Trump’s “First 100 Hours.”
Nine reasons why Trump means business this time
Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, every new US administration has been judged on its first hundred days, but it is in the first 24 hours, with a flurry of executive orders and memorandums, that a president sets the tone for the coming four years. The first 24 hours hint at nine themes that will define Donald Trump’s second administration.
Trump is determined to settle scores
Theme one: Trump II will see ‘America First’ placed at the heart of White House policy even more so than during Trump I.
Among the memorandums issued from the Oval Office after noon on Monday was one outlining an ‘America First trade policy’, a revival of Trump I positions linking trade and national security, emphasising the interests of American workers and manufacturers, and interrogating Chinese trade practices and infringement of US intellectual property. Similarly, there was a memorandum revoking US participation in the OECD’s global tax deal, which Trump’s people regard as an infringement on US sovereignty and economically harmful to American enterprise.
‘America First’ will not be about trade alone. One executive order undertook to ‘put the interests of the United States and the American people first’ in negotiating international agreements on climate change, which ‘must not unduly or unfairly burden the United States’. This order re-withdraws the US from the Paris climate agreement, Trump having taken America out during his first term and Biden having taken it back in. It also revokes American assent and funding to all accords under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Foreign policy, too, will be anchored in what Trump perceives to be US national priorities. An executive order instructed the Secretary of State to ‘champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first’ in foreign policy. Another executive order paused all foreign assistance for ninety days, instructed reviews into current spending commitments and stated that only those ‘fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States’ would be restored.
Theme two: Trump intends to enforce America’s borders and reverse the tide of illegal immigration.
Among the pile of immigration-related missives fired out from behind the Resolute desk was a proclamation recognising mass illegal entry via the US-Mexico border as an ‘invasion’, and another proclamation barring entry into the United States by anyone involved in this incursion. In addition, there was an executive order providing for the building of a wall along the border, prevention of illegal entry into the country, and the detention and deportation of unlawful aliens. A further executive order undertook to ‘faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens, particularly those aliens who threaten the safety or security of the American people’. This will be done by hiring more enforcement officers, identifying and deporting illegal aliens, denying government benefits to illegals and refusing federal funds for sanctuary cities.
To underscore how seriously Trump takes the issue, he penned an executive order commanding the US Armed Forces to ‘prioritise the protection of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the United States along our national borders’. This reframes illegal immigration as a national defence issue and not only a border control issue. This was girded by an executive order denying citizenship documents or recognition to anyone born in the United States to a mother who was in the country temporarily or unlawfully. This addresses right-wing concerns about ‘anchor babies’, children whose parents entered the US illegally to give birth and gain for their offspring and themselves the benefits of American citizenship.
Theme three: National security, public safety and refugee screening will be leading priorities.
Trump has always been a law-and-order guy and he clearly intends to step this up over the next four years. He drew up a memorandum reorganising the National Security Council and signed an executive order designating Mexican drug cartels and criminal gangs including MS-13 as foreign terrorist organisations, allow for tougher measures to be taken in countering them.
The threat to public safety from dangerous people who enter the country as refugees was addressed by an executive order suspending the US Refugee Admissions Programme, meaning no further refugees will be admitted except on a case-by-case basis if jointly agreed to by the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security. Every 90 days, the suspension will be reconsidered to see if Homeland Security is confident that the programme can be resumed in a manner that prioritises public safety and national security, will admit ‘only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate’, and would preserve resources for US citizens.
In a similar vein, there was an executive order pledging to protect US citizens from ‘aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes’. This will mostly take the form of enhancing visa vetting and screening of refugees. Trump is an ardent believer in capital punishment and so it was unsurprising to see an executive order restoring the federal death penalty. Thirteen federal prisoners were given a lethal injection during Trump I but the Biden administration paused further executions. The order instructs the Attorney General during Trump II to pursue capital punishment in more cases and to seek federal jurisdiction in state crimes that involve the murder of a law enforcement officer or in which the offender is an illegal alien.
‘America First’ will not be about trade alone
Theme four: The second Trump administration is committed to undoing Joe Biden’s legacy in the White House.
Biden used executive powers to wipe the slate clean of Trumpism when he took over and now Trump will return the favour. He signed an executive order rescinding dozens of Biden-era executive orders, including those relating to racial equity, gender identity, climate change, immigration, refugee resettlement, pandemic response, and Biden’s sanctions against Israelis living in Judea and Samaria. Among the initiatives to fall foul of Trump’s slashing pen are the White House Gender Policy Council, the Climate Change Support Office, and the President’s Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement.
A major theme of Trump’s election campaign was blaming the cost of living crisis on Biden’s tax and spend policies, which Trump deemed inflationary. As such, he inked a memorandum directing the federal government to provide price relief, including by reducing the cost of housing, increasing supply, scrapping ‘unnecessary’ healthcare expenses, encouraging the unemployed into the workforce and doing away with climate policies that drive up gasoline and grocery costs.
The frequency with which political control of the executive branch changes means there is a see-sawing quality to US policy. Trump lodged an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organisation. (He originally withdrew in 2020 in response to its handling of the Covid pandemic and the undue influence of China over the organisation, but Biden reversed that move.) More controversially, even among otherwise sympathetic right-wingers, was an executive order pausing enforcement of Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the legislation which effectively bans TikTok in the United States. Trump’s team have signalled scepticism towards concerns that the video and music app is harmful to the United States to the advantage of Communist China. Many who generally praise Trump’s national security believe he is perilously wrong on this one.
Theme five: Understanding how the issue motivates his base and pries away moderate voters from Democrats, Trump will push back against ‘woke’.
No one is about to mistake Donald Trump for a radical feminist, yet his executive order making it US government policy to ‘recognise two sexes, male and female’ affirms a fundamental principle of gender-critical feminism. The directive requires federal agencies to ‘enforce laws governing sex-based rights, protections, opportunities, and accommodations to protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes’, putting down in black and white that women’s single-sex spaces should be safeguarded. Another executive order revoked diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and racial preferences in the federal government, while an additional executive order promised to protect freedom of expression and enjoined the federal government from participating in any abridgement of speech rights.
The biggest score Trump wants to settle is one he believes played a role in shifting public opinion ahead of the 2020 president election
A little further down the hierarchy of culture war battlefronts, Trump set out an executive order instructing federal agencies to ‘honour the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans in our nation’s rich past’ when naming natural landmarks and works of art. The order reverses Barack Obama’s 2015 directive which renamed Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in the United States, ‘Denali’, the name traditionally assigned to the peak by local indigenous people. But the order will garner most attention for its announcement that the United States will now refer to the Gulf of Mexico as ‘the Gulf of America’. Meanwhile, there was also a memorandum ordering federal officials to ensure that all new public buildings ‘respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States’. This is one area where classical conservatives and the very online MAGA movement are in agreement.
Theme six: Energy security will be a key area of action for Trump II.
Monday saw an executive order declaring a national energy emergency and directing federal agencies to expedite exploration and production of domestic oil and gas resources. There as also an executive order encouraging ‘energy exploration and production’; safeguarding ‘economic and national security and military preparedness’ by ensuring ‘an abundant supply of reliable energy’; cancelling Biden’s electric vehicle mandate; reviewing any agency action or policy that might impede energy security; speeding up oil and gas permits; and withdrawing funding for the Green New Deal. That represents a veritable bonfire of Biden administration policies and could also be designed to inflict the maximum pain and anxiety among climate-alarmed liberls. To make matters worse for them, there was an executive order allowing gas exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, something environmentalists have fought against for decades. Trump also sent out a memorandum suspending any further permits for wind farms on the US outer continental shelf and another one ordering that water reserves be directed to southern California rather than to the protection of marine life.
Theme seven: Having learned the lessons of his first term, Trump is putting his people in key positions for his second term.
There were the usual memorandums appointing acting Cabinet secretaries, nominating full-term Cabinet secretaries, nominating sub-Cabinet appointees, and designating chairmen of various federal commissions. Such things are run of the mill for every incoming administration. But there was also a memorandum decreeing that the process of security-clearing Trump appointees to sensitive roles within the President’s executive office must take no more than six months. The memo blames ‘a backlog created by the Biden Administration’ and a ‘broken security clearance process’ for Trump appointees not having received access to the White House to take up their new posts. Allied to this was an executive order strengthening accountability for federal employees in policy-influencing positions, reflecting Trump’s grievances about senior agency staff attempting to resist the MAGA agenda during his first term.
Theme eight: Trump plans not only to stack government with MAGA people but to reform the size and structure of government.
As expected, there was an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and a memorandum implementing a hiring freeze, which will prevent federal departments and agencies from filling vacancies or creating new positions. (Defence, immigration, national security and public safety agencies are exempt.) Reflecting the innovation-minded thinking of Trump’s inner circle, another memorandum instructed that no further regulations be created unless approved by the Trump administration. This was accompanied by a memorandum rescinding any arrangements allowing federal employees to work from home, an executive order reforming the federal hiring process so that it prioritises merit, ability and commitment to government efficiency over immutable characteristics, and a memorandum shaking up the organisation and performance of senior federal staff.
Theme nine: Trump is determined to settle scores.
Donald Trump is one of life’s great grudge-bearers and his initial executive actions reflected this trait. There was a proclamation pardoning or commuting the sentences of those involved in the January 6 insurrection and an executive order directing that the US flag always be flown at full-staff on inauguration day. (Old Glory was flying half-staff on the morning of Trump’s inauguration in honour of the late Jimmy Carter.)
These were joined by an executive order mandating an investigation of the Biden administration for a ‘systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents’, including by setting law enforcement and intelligence agencies on them. This reflects Trump’s belief that investigations and prosecutions brought against him and his associates were a form of political warfare waged by the previous White House and its ideological fellow travellers.
The biggest score Trump wants to settle is one he believes played a role in shifting public opinion ahead of the 2020 president election. He issued an executive order addressing the political misuse of US intelligence services, which revokes the security clearances of former officials who signed a letter during the 2020 election dismissing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. It also withdraws clearance from John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, for a 2019 book ‘rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government’.
Donald Trump didn’t get much done in his first term, but he appears to mean business this time. His first day back in the Oval Office proves it, and he has another 1,460 days to put his agenda into effect.
Is Starmer right about the ‘new’ terror threat?
Sir Keir Starmer was explicit in his response to the Southport attack: Britain faces a new terror threat from “loners, misfits (and) young men in their bedroom(s)” radicalised by online violence. There is to be a public inquiry into the state failures that allowed Axel Rudakubana to murder three young girls in Southport in one of the worst attacks on children in UK history. The Prime Minister said the horrific attack last year must be “a line in the sand”. He vowed to change terror laws to deal with lone killers, to ensure that perpetrators like Rudakubana could be charged with terror offences despite having no coherent ideology.
The phenomenon of young men obsessed with extreme violence and determined to act out their fantasies is anything but new
Starmer went on to argue that the nature of terrorism had changed and that the law was not up to speed with what he called a “new threat”. The PM said that, alongside more organised terror attacks, “We also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by (those) accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.”
This is all well and good as an analysis of the problem, but is Starmer correct in suggesting that the Southport killer represents a “new threat”? Hardly. After all, haven’t counter-terror police been warning of precisely this kind of danger – from lone killers radicalised online – for the last decade and more?
Several fatal and attempted attacks have involved young men radicalised online. Ali Harbi Ali, an Islamic State supporter, was given a whole-life sentence for murdering MP Sir David Amess during a constituency surgery in Essex in 2021. Ali stabbed the MP more than 20 times.
Jake Davison, who had a fascination with mass shootings and serial killers, shot five people in Plymouth in August 2021. Paul Dunleavy, a 17-year old from Rugby who offered to build weapons for people online, was jailed for terrorism offences in 2020. Just last week, Callum Parslow, a Nazi-obsessive who had Hitler’s signature tattooed on his arm, was jailed for attempted murder after stabbing an asylum seeker at a hotel in Worcestershire last year.
In other words, the phenomenon of young men obsessed with extreme violence and determined to act out their fantasies, is anything but new. It is somewhat disingenuous of the Prime Minister to suggest otherwise. The bigger issue has always been about how to go about tackling the growing range of challenges faced by the police and counter-terrorism forces.
The Southport murders are merely the latest to throw up the same old questions about why government agencies failed to prevent them from happening. The authorities had contact with the Southport killer, yet between them they failed to identify the danger he posed. How and why did they fail to identify and act on the risk?
More broadly, it is obvious enough that Britain’s terrorism laws require an overhaul to correct some of the constraints that stopped the police declaring the Southport stabbings a terror attack. Officers discovered an academic study of an al-Qaeda training manual on one of Rudakubana’s devices, which included a step-by-step guide to carrying out a terrorist attack. This resulted in him being charged with possessing terrorist material. It did not however warrant the Southport attack being declared a terror incident by Britain’s national counter-terrorism and policing unit. The threshold that must be passed is whether an attack was intended to advance an ideological, political, religious or racial cause. The authorities found no evidence of a motivating ideology and the Southport killer has not said anything publicly. All the police could point to was a teenager obsessed with violence. Changes are long overdue.
The public will judge the government on substance rather than political rhetoric. Starmer’s words about the nature of terrorism changing, with acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners and misfits, are insufficient. There is little evidence so far that the Prime Minister has devised an actual policy answer to the growing problems.
The Arts Council should subsidise footballers
The Norwegian footballer Erling Haaland will, upon commencement of his new nine-year contract extension with Manchester City, be paid £1 million a week. On pocketing his first colossal pay cheque (which includes sponsorship income), Haaland will cruise past his rivals in the traditional European leagues. Real Madrid’s Kylian Mbappé is forced to get by on a paltry €45 million a year, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah on his derisory €18 million, and Ballon d’Or winner Rodri with his piddling £9 million.
The Finnish government used to pay its greatest artists an annual stipend
Has the world gone insane? One million pounds a week, for kicking a ball around for a couple of hours? It is a sum that might make Croesus himself blush. The word ‘obscene’ is often attached to such gargantuan salaries for sports players and entertainers, and it is hard to avoid when you compare it with what a hard-working manual labourer has to get by on, or a teacher, or even a freelance journalist. Can it possibly be justified? And how do you place a financial value on a footballer?
The first is a vexatious question because there is no satisfactory answer. The obvious response is no, but that sounds prissy and mean-spirited (Starmer-ish?). Those who would say yes would doubtless argue Haaland is not just a supremely gifted player, but that he helps generate huge income for his employer while bringing moments of intense excitement to millions. Plus, after those nine-and-a-half years, he could have a half-century of post-playing life to support himself and his family. But a million a week? It still sounds bonkers.
As for the second question – how do you place a financial value on a footballer? – this is complex. In terms of pure on-field contribution, Haaland is precious indeed – a veritable goal factory. He rarely gets injured and is still only 24. Even off the ball, he has value: he is fearsome to behold and strikes terror into defenders’ hearts with his mere towering, marauding Viking appearance. He is clearly one of the most effective and thus valuable players in the world.
However, I would be tempted to introduce an aesthetic element into the equation. As a lover of the joga bonito, I’d argue that a player’s artistic contribution ought to be a factor in evaluating their financial worth. Here Haaland is on shakier ground. He is a power player – dynamic, fast, immensely strong – but not exactly a fantasista. I could watch reels of Messi, Ronaldinho, Maradona or Glenn Hoddle (as a Spurs fan) all night, but Haaland? He has apparently scored an amazing 264 goals in his career, but I’m struggling to remember any of them.
Perhaps that rare breed of footballers who arouse an almost sensual pleasure in the viewer deserves a financial premium. If clubs are unwilling to pay it (and it may not translate into trophies, after all), perhaps the government should, with Arts Council grants awarded to the most creative players. I’d nominate Matt Le Tissier for a retrospective payment on this basis.
This isn’t as mad as it sounds. Lionel Messi was recognised as a tourist asset to Barcelona and Spain, such was his must-see, bucket-list attraction even for non-football fans. And there is a precedent: the Finnish government used to pay its greatest artists an annual stipend, as recognition of their genius and contribution to the nation. The composer Sibelius benefited from such an award for much of his career.
In Haaland’s case, though, his salary may not so much reflect his value as a player, but his value to his particular club at a particular time, and evidence of a distorted market. Just as a struggling salesman buys a flashy car to project an aura of success, so Manchester City – currently a catastrophic fifth in the Premier League – may be attempting to signal confidence in their future.
The enormous figures could also indicate the threat posed by the seemingly limitless resources of the upstart Saudi league. Haaland’s £1 million a week still leaves him well behind Cristiano Ronaldo’s £3 million at Al-Nassr and Neymar’s £2 million at Al-Hilal. Manchester City needed to pay well over the odds to secure Haaland. It also sends a message to the Saudis that, however many sacks of gold they offer, City can still compete.
There has been outrage at Haaland’s contract revelations, but before we get too pious, who among us would turn down a salary increase? ‘I’d like to be paid less, please,’ is perhaps a sentence that has never been uttered in the history of humanity. And if anyone is going to get rich off football, it should be the players.
There is surely a question, though, of whether, for the long-term health of the game, such enormous sums are sustainable. With such stratospherically high salaries, the average fan occupies another planet from the demi-gods on the pitch. We may start to feel ever more alienated and resentful. The gap, already huge, is threatening to become simply unimaginable. And where might that lead? Erling Haaland has two private jets. I can’t even afford a car.
The vanity of hair transplants
I used to think that one of the few things that men had over women was their lack of manifest vanity. Not that men weren’t vain, but apart from turning their chests into Doritos at the gym or dyeing their greying locks that unnatural shade of black, there were very few ways for them to enact these impulses. That was, until hair transplants.
One of the men in my local corner shop was proudly peacocking the follicles sprouting from his forehead
As it turns out, hair transplants aren’t actually a new thing. According to my research (Google), modern hair transplant techniques were pioneered in Japan in the 1930s. Despite being nearly 100 years old, the operation has surged in popularity in recent years. Why? Well, it seems to be a heady mix of technological advancements (non-invasive procedures such as follicular unit extraction); vocal celebrity champions (Wayne Rooney, Jamie Laing and Anton Du Beke); and the pandemic (both the endless Zoom calls causing an increased fixation on physical appearance, and the opportunity for low-key recovery provided by the lockdowns). The result is that now, everywhere you look, there are men nurturing budding barnets and no shame whatsoever. I, for one, am horrified.
The other day, one of the men in my local corner shop was proudly peacocking the follicles sprouting from his forehead to my other half, who is bald. It was a little upsetting. Not for him, nor my partner – who has long been at peace with his lack of hair, and found the whole exchange morbidly fascinating – but for me. I saw the fact he’d undergone such a procedure as embarrassing, but he clearly thought it as some kind of badge of honour. A sign of success. His excitement was obvious; any day now his head would once again be filled with hair, and then his life would really start.
I’ve always preferred my men sans hair. As Freud would undoubtedly contend, this is because I am the daughter of a baldie (it should be noted that my dad had a fantastic head of hair in his day, but when his hairline started receding he bit the bullet and did the only sensible thing – shaved off what remained). I think what really put me off though was growing up in the 1990s with its horrors such as curtains and frosted tips. While some women fantasise about running their hands through a man’s luscious locks, I’ve always found the allure of a shaved head hard to resist. It’s cleaner, simpler, and you can’t over-gel it.
Sadly, few men seem to agree. According to the Wimpole Clinic, ‘Europeans saw a 240 per cent increase in interest in hair transplant surgeries between 2010 and 2021.’ Like all cosmetic surgeries, it’s a lucrative business; market research and industry analysis agency Straits Research claim the global hair transplant market was worth $8 billion in 2023, and will grow to $16.6 billion by 2032.
The predicted growth is hardly surprising. Search ‘hair transplant’ on social media and you’ll be greeted with an endless stream of (mainly young) men eagerly sharing their journeys from slaphead to mophead (via the stomach-churning pustulation stage). Depressingly, most of these stories are accompanied by tales of depression and shame, all caused by the onset of baldness – a completely natural stage in the ageing process.
The problem with hair transplants has little to do with my tastes. It’s what it says about our society, and where we’re heading, that disturbs me. Along with Botox, fillers and other widely available ‘tweakments’, I’m troubled that many people are opting for medical procedures instead of facing the challenges of ageing. Even the industry is keen to remind potential clients of the risks. The British Association of Hair Restoration Surgery recently put out a statement saying: ‘It is important that members of the public understand that hair transplant surgery is not without risk. While the chances of life-threatening complications are less than with general plastic surgery procedures, they still occur. Appearance-related complications are more common and can have a significant psychological impact on patients.’
What we’re seeing is the normalisation of vanity under the guise of mental health – when actually, the healthier option would be to accept that none of us is perfect, physically or otherwise, and neither are we meant to be. So if you are balding and reading this: stay strong. Resist the transplants. And keep your hair off.
I love Edinburgh. I’m not sure it loves me
This year I shall have lived in Edinburgh for a quarter of a century. I fell in love with the city on the 23 bus travelling from the New Town to the Old Town. There was so much architecture. Gothic and Georgian, medieval, baronial. So many turrets and finials, tollbooths and towers. I was drunk on the stuff. Add pomp – a Royal Mile, a castle, a palace. Then the libraries, art galleries, museums. And that’s before you get to bookshops and Edinburgh’s proud moniker, the first Unesco City of Literature. What other city has a railway station (Waverley) named after a novel or a high street (Princes Street) with shops on one side and gardens on the other?
The 23 bus was taking me to the psychiatric hospital just beyond Morningside
Edinburgh doesn’t love me. It’s probably too haughty to love anyone, unlike Glasgow, which wraps its citizens in an umbilical hug from which they can never escape. But the city isn’t as snobby as it used to be. Even though it still has these amazing private schools (like Fettes, with huge grounds and huge fees), it welcomes strangers. It welcomes asylum seekers and Chinese students and festival goers (though it’s thinking of charging the latter a tourist tax), and it tolerates me.
The 23 bus was taking me to the psychiatric hospital just beyond Morningside, where I had a job as a writer in a team of artists hoping to help the patients. I didn’t last long. I discovered the patients didn’t like words much. Words are so reasonable. So grammatical. Tangled and troubled hearts and minds are more easily expressed with paint, colour, anything tactile. I left the job, but I stayed in Edinburgh.
I shouldn’t have been there really. It felt like a mistake. Back in England, I’d been married to a Scot who was forever lamenting his exile. I got fed up with it. And after one too many holidays on Skye, swore I’d never go to Scotland again. Then my son began work at a yoga centre in Edinburgh. Then my daughter was given a place at Glasgow University, and then, after a year as writer-in-residence at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, I came to Edinburgh and found the International Book Festival. These days, I think Edinburgh was my destiny. It was in my cards.
Until recently, the Book Festival was in Charlotte Square Gardens (overlooked by the manse of the first minister). The garden was full of big tents where you could sit and listen to famous authors while the rain pattered gently on the canvas overhead. The place was full of poets and novelists and book lovers queued round the square for a seat in a tent. There was a wonderfully fancy yurt just for the authors. I wanted to pitch my own tent and live in the garden forever. In lieu, I bought a flat not too far away.
During my early years here, I invited all my friends to the International Festival and to the Fringe and the Book Festival. I spent a fortune on tickets, queued endlessly, and loved the vibe and excitement and passion of it all. I’ve only been to the Tattoo once (not being of a military disposition), but I loved hearing, every night, the gun going off and the lone piper playing his lament from the castle ramparts.
Then there’s the best walk in the world, down the Royal Mile. Pass the Writers’ Museum and the Storytelling Centre and the statue of the poet Robert Fergusson, and all the narrow wynds off, and there’s the Poetry Library. When I found it and its wonderful director of the time, Robyn Marsack, I knew I’d come home. Venture past the Poetry Library (if you can), and you find the Scottish Parliament’s extraordinary Enric Miralles architecture and, keeping it company, the Palace of Holyrood.
In later years and with age, I’ve become a bit like many of Edinburgh’s residents: slightly resentful of our city being taken over by tourists for all of August. Now you can’t get on a bus in your own city and the restaurants won’t let you book a table. But it’s only one month of the year, and when they’ve gone, a wonderful calm comes over the place and it’s ours again and you can chat about it to the taxi drivers.
Last year, for the first time ever, ill health meant I missed the Book Festival in its new abode near The Meadows. I’ll be back this year, though maybe not quite so often as before. I missed Hogmanay too, but that wasn’t my fault. For the first time since 2006, it was cancelled by the weather.
Edinburgh was 900 years old last year, and not for nothing is it known as the Athens of the North. It’s that skyline of Arthur’s Seat on its volcanic rock, the castle looming over the city, St Giles’s Cathedral (its tower topped with a crown), and the spires of St Mary’s that grabs your heart. Of course, there are parts of Edinburgh that are ugly and horrible, but I never go there. And there are trams now, which weren’t here when I first arrived. I don’t go on them. Too new for me.
SNP minister admits misleading parliament over Limogate
Well, well, well. Just when the Scottish government thought it had steadied the SNP ship after two rather tumultuous years, another scandal has hit the party. Health Secretary Neil Gray is in the spotlight after it transpired that he had been using taxpayer-funded ministerial cars to take him to sports matches in the latest ‘Limogate’ development. Gray had initially claimed he attended matches in a work capacity and had minutes for every meeting – but this evening the SNP minister has now admitted to inadvertently misleading MSPs over the matter.
Between 2022 and 2024, Gray attended nine football matches involving Aberdeen or Scotland using taxpayer-funded, chauffeur-driven cars. His attendance at the 2023 Scottish League Cup Final between Aberdeen and Rangers raised eyebrows, however, after Freedom of Information requests revealed that there was ‘no note’ of minutes or even a meeting summary produced from the excursion. This is despite the Health Secretary claiming in the Holyrood chamber that notes had been taken. Dear oh dear…
This afternoon, Gray addressed parliament to apologise for his earlier comments. ‘I recognise that I assured that there would be summaries available for all the engagement,’ he told MSPs. ‘It has since come to light that this is incorrect and I am sorry for that inadvertent error.’
Not that his political opponents have been left satisfied with Gray’s admission. Scottish Labour slammed the SNP minister for only apologising due to pressure from the press while the Tories mocked his ‘humiliating’ row-back. It’s not the first sorry Gray has had to issue on the matter, admitting in November that he regretted giving the impression of ‘acting more as a fan and less as a minister’ over his chauffeur-driven trips to Aberdeen games. And it’s not the first nationalist Health Secretary under fire over his expenses claims either. Will the SNP drama ever end? Don’t hold your breath…
Southport and the problem with judge-led inquiries
Sir Keir Starmer has promised an inquiry into the events around the Southport murders committed by Axel Rudakubana, saying there are questions about the ‘Westminster system’. ‘I’m angry about it,’ the Prime Minister says. ‘Nothing will be off the table in this inquiry.’
It is not yet clear who will run that inquiry, or how. There will no doubt be an assumption that the inquiry must be on a statutory footing and led by a judge. Such inquiries are generally seen as the gold standard; anything that isn’t a statutory inquiry led by a judge will likely lead to political trouble for the Prime Minister.
But is appointing a judge the best way to unravel complicated problems of public administration and policy?
For years now, thoughtful observers of inquiries have been suggesting that, actually, a judge-led inquiry isn’t always the most effective route to the truth – likewise the statutory status that allows the inquiry to compel witnesses to attend.
The failings of legalistic inquiries have been clear for several years now, and nowhere more so than the Covid investigation. Five years on from the pandemic, and three years since it began, the Covid inquiry is moving glacially – it might just manage to hold its final public hearings next year, but may not report fully before 2028. Compare that to Sweden, where the equivalent inquiry reported in 2022.
A significant – and, some think, growing – problem with judge-led, statutory inquiries is that everyone involved has a lawyer and everything discussed has to be passed through multiple lawyers. This is, in a narrow sense, quite right and healthy – in a quasi-judicial process with the scope for consequential criticism, everyone involved should have legal advice.
Yet inevitably, the more lawyers a process involves, the longer it takes. And, some say, the harder it is to get to the facts; the Covid inquiry illustrates the point, as politicians taking the stand for questioning adopt a defensive crouch rather than frankly discussing their decisions.
This can be tricky territory. Due process is important. Laws are important. Lawyers are, sometimes, important – but not always. Yet in some political conversations these days, it feels as if anyone questioning the authority and primacy of lawyers and judges is at risk of being damned as a Trumpian fascist intent on ending the rule of law.
Well, I’m a lifelong centrist and product of the ‘Westminster system’ that Starmer is now decrying, and I don’t think that judges and lawyers are always the right people to run public inquiries.
I am not alone in this view.
As long ago as 2014, a House of Lords select committee challenged the dominance of judge-led inquiries, concluding that ‘ministers have in the past been too ready to assume that a serving judge would be the most suitable chairman.’
The successor of that committee is the Statutory Inquiries Committee, appointed to consider the efficacy of the law and practice relating to statutory inquiries under the Inquiries Act 2005.
It is chaired by Lord Norton of Louth, one of Britain’s leading authorities on public administration, and includes a battery of heavy-duty Lords lawyers.
In September, the committee produced a report that is well worth reading in the context of the Southport inquiry. It once again asks whether appointing a judge or even giving an inquiry statutory powers is the best way to investigate contentious public policies and administration.
It notes that some of the most successful public inquiries of recent years, such as the Hillsborough Independent Panel, had neither a judge as chair nor statutory powers.
I don’t think that judges and lawyers are always the right people to run public inquiries
This shouldn’t be surprising. A legalistic process isn’t always the best way to discover and explore issues via candid discussion. When witnesses are forced to lawyer up and address an inquiry via its counsel, they can also clam up; an inquiry should always be investigative rather than adversarial.
As such, Lord Norton’s committee cautioned governments against reflexively appointing a judge with statutory powers to run every inquiry:
Ministers should select the legal basis and chair of an inquiry on a case-by-case basis and not feel tied to a particular model. Ministers should keep in mind the option of holding a non-statutory inquiry (given its relative agility) and then converting it if witnesses fail to cooperate. Ministers should also consider selecting non-judge chairs or appointing a panel.
Intriguingly, the government was due to respond to the Norton committee in November but still has not yet done so.
The Lords committee offered good advice for getting the best out of a public inquiry, by questioning the political orthodoxy around judges and statutory powers.
Will Sir Keir Starmer KC, a man steeped in the traditions of the law, including the veneration of judges, take that advice and ask someone other than a judge to investigate the Southport horror?
The splatter of green and yellow that caused uproar in the Victorian art world
London, June 1877. Beneath a cloudy sky, the celebrated art critic John Ruskin strode along Bond Street towards the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery. Inside, he viewed a smash-hit show of beautiful and progressive art. At least that was the popular opinion. With a few exceptions, Ruskin dismissed the works on display as eccentric, impertinent and indulgent. Worst of all? James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket’, a deliciously wispy painting that captures sparks fizzing and flaring in a dark night sky.
Ruskin fired the first shot; then Whistler sued him for libel, firing straight back
At least that’s how I would describe it. Ruskin’s response was more barbed: ‘I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ It wasn’t simply that he disliked Whistler’s shimmering picture of fireworks illuminating the smoggy blue-green air above the Thames. It was that, in his eyes, it wasn’t art, nor its maker an artist.
Paul Thomas Murphy’s informative and entertaining book is a double biography of Whistler and Ruskin and a blow-by-blow account of their ‘battle for modern art’. With his scathing review, Ruskin fired the first shot; then Whistler sued him for libel, firing straight back. The court case examined whether or not the critic’s words were fair – and, unofficially, unavoidably, whether the artist’s paintings were good or bad.
For Whistler, an American in London, fiery and flamboyant, living beyond his means, the lawsuit was as much about the 1,000 guineas in damages as it was about clearing his name. For Ruskin, it was, writes Murphy, ‘an opportunity to reach out and educate the public – his public – more widely than ever before’. While Whistler was a passionate exponent of art for art’s sake, Ruskin, the pre-eminent cultural theorist of the Victorian era, believed that art ought to be true to nature, with order, meaning and a moral function. No wonder, then, that he objected to the canvas in question, which, with its blurry backdrop and barely there passersby, steered queasily close to abstraction.
The trial took place over two days in November 1878 and is the centrepiece of Falling Rocket. In the preceding pages Murphy conjures the bubbling-up of anticipation, and the events in the crowded courtroom verge on the cinematic. While Ruskin was too ill to attend (suffering a mental breakdown and sending the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones to testify in his place), the plaintiff was in his element, garnering applause with his witty responses. Did he truly think the two days’ labour he spent on his ‘Nocturne’ was worth the 200 guineas he was charging? ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.’
Of course, the battle for modern art rumbled on long after the verdict was handed down (Whistler won, sort of – the case was decided in his favour, but he received only a farthing in damages). Murphy shares a before-and-after of the two leading men. Early on, we meet the parents who fostered their sons’ talents. John James Ruskin filled the family library with literature. Anna McNeill Whistler took young Jemie to galleries and academies. And, though Whistler abandoned his mother’s God for what he called his ‘whimpering goddess’ (Art), Anna played a key role in her son’s transfiguration. It was his 1871 portrait of her in her black widow’s dress and white cap that freed him from a disheartening series of stop-starts; and it was she who pushed him to produce his hazy moonlit scenes in the summer of the same year.
Among the wider cast of characters are love interests, some less successful than others. Ruskin never recovered after the young Rose La Touche rejected his proposal. Effie Gray accepted him, but he was sexually anxious and refused to consummate the marriage, which was later annulled, freeing her to be with John Everett Millais. Whistler had a habit of making enemies of his friends. His run-in with the wealthy shipowner Frederick Leyland, once his greatest patron, was crucial. Whistler redecorated his dining room obsessively and, in Leyland’s eyes, disastrously (think peacock patterns and metallic leaf), which set him back financially before the trial. The book also includes a lengthy list of critics and artists called as witnesses.
All of which comes together to make for an account that will appeal to aficionados and amateurs alike with its mix of art history and action. As for who really won the battle for modern art, Whistler undoubtedly was, in Murphy’s words, ‘foremost among those who kicked open the door to the modern’. But, while devoted to the Old Masters, Ruskin would turn out to be ahead of his time, too, warning anyone who would listen in 1875 of ‘some terrible change of climate coming upon the world for its sin, like another deluge’.
The self-serving delusions of the ‘Swastika Kaiser’
Whenever a new study of the Nazi regime appears, it is taken as a given that after Adolf Hitler seized power and became dictator of Germany in 1933 an egalitarian society emerged, very different to previous decadent, backward-looking generations. In this modern era, it is assumed, the concerns of the Kaiser and the German elite were at best ignored and at worst made another target of the Führer’s purges.
In 1933, Wilhelm called Hitler a ‘torchbearer with unparalleled force of conviction and self-sacrifice’
It’s a tempting summation, but an over-simplistic one. As a biographer of the Duke of Windsor, I drew on documents that suggested that Hitler was in fact deeply impressed by the former Edward VIII. He not only hoped that he would prevail during the abdication crisis, but was delighted to receive him and his wife Wallis with all due ceremony and warmth in Germany in October 1937.
Stephan Malinowksi’s comprehensive history of the Hohenzollerns, ably translated by Jefferson Chase, emphasises that Hitler, for all of his vaunted commitment to a new classless Germany based on the principle of Volks-gemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’, was still dazzled by the breeding and advantages that an aristocratic title conferred. This was doubly true if the bearer of that title was Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, who was compelled to abdicate in humiliating circumstances after Germany’s defeat in the first world war and the subsequent November Revolution of 1918.
Born in 1882, Prince Wilhelm had fought for his country with distinction, commanding troops at Verdun and displaying conspicuous loyalty to his father the Kaiser at all times. Yet when the balance of power shifted, he (who was nothing if not self-interested) decided that he was best off associating with the coming regime and seeing what he could obtain for himself and his family in the process.
Malinowski’s compelling book explores the complexities of the unequal relationship between Hitler, the son of a minor Austrian civil servant, and Prince Wilhelm, a man born into unimaginable privilege and wealth, which he then forfeited. It is suggested that the two men had nothing in common save their opposition to democracy in Germany, and that they ‘both started agitating against the Weimar Republic at the same time’.
This proved to be enough. It helped that the Hohenzollerns had always inspired a measure of affection in their country. This meant that, even though they had ostensibly been neutralised with the coming of the Weimar, they believed they could capitalise on a useful idiot who would sweep away the opposition and prepare the ground for their return to power in some form.
Naturally, they were misled; and they severely underestimated what Hitler and the Nazis were capable of. Yet Wilhelm was no naive scion of the ancien regime. Initially, at least, he was an enthusiastic and committed supporter of fascism, who endorsed Hitler in 1932 with the hope that he might take on a role – such as ‘Reich President’ – that would place him at the heart of the new order. Even when this did not come to pass, in large part because of his father’s disapproval, the ‘Swastika Kaiser’, as he was known, wrote a newspaper article in October 1933 in which he called Hitler a ‘torch-bearer’ with ‘unparalleled force of conviction and self-sacrifice’. He suggested that loyalty to the Führer was ‘a duty of honour and a debt of gratitude for everyone with a German heart beating in their chest’, just as he was an enthusiastic exponent of what he called the ‘merciless battle against Jewry’. His support only waned when his friend Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor, was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
Wilhelm, like so many others, was outplayed and outmatched by Hitler. Denied the chance of high office, let alone any hope of seeing his family restored to the influence he craved, he withdrew from politics and was careful to be seen as neither taking sides for or against the Nazis during the second world war. This realpolitik meant that he was spared in the purge that followed the failed von Stauffenberg plot in July 1944, and that he also escaped the reparative justice visited on many of his countrymen at the end of the war, although he died a deeply diminished figure in 1951.
Malinowski leaves his readers in no doubt that the Hohenzollerns deserve opprobrium rather than respect – a conclusion that has caused considerable controversy in Germany. He writes that ‘their post-1918 attempt to connect with and constrain the Nazi movement reflects the self-estimation and mistaken calculations of the conservative camp as a whole’. Equally, their later attempts to depict themselves as embodying the last hope of principled resistance is, in his scornful estimation, a final ‘flickering of their impressive talent for creating self-serving legends’. Anyone who reads this important book will agree.
Why do we assume smell is our weakest sense?
Rose George has narrated this article for you to listen to.
My cat can smell depression. Another family cat could smell my stepfather’s dementia. They both became more affectionate and tactile: the dementia-smelling cat would gently paw my stepfather, when he hadn’t even liked her when he had been well. My cat comes in close when my mood is darker. Perhaps both cats were using other cues, but I’m convinced it was smell.
Up until the 18th century, doctors relied for diagnoses on smell as much as anything else
For something that Jonas Olofsson calls ‘the easiest and most natural thing in the world’, smell is satisfyingly complicated. When it comes to humans’ ability to smell, as Olofsson persuades us in this captivating book, it has also been profoundly neglected. This wasn’t always the case. Up until the 18th century, doctors relied for diagnoses on smell as much as anything else. They ‘squeezed, observed, smelled and tasted’. They knew that ‘diphtheria smelled sweet, scurvy smelled pungent, typhus smelled like freshly baked rye bread and scrofula, a type of tuberculosis, smelled like stale beer’.
These inklings were lost when the Enlightenment arrived, and since then humans have come to think of themselves as poor smellers, at least compared to dogs and other animals. We assume smell is our weakest sense and sight our strongest. We now live in an age of sight and are slaves to screens. In one study, 50 per cent of Americans who were given the choice of keeping either their sense of smell or their mobile chose the phone. But smell has a power like no other. It takes us back to childhood in an instant.
In fact, writes Olofsson, a professor of psychology at Stockholm University, where he runs the Sensitive Cognition Interaction Laboratory, we are much better smellers than we think. A mouse’s olfactory bulbs occupy 2 per cent of its brain; a human’s only take up 0.01 per cent. But that is probably because human brains are so large. We have as many neurons in our olfactory bulb as a mouse: ten million. (This is a fact to remember for the next time you are lacking small talk. Do some smell talk.)
The human sense of smell is good enough to detect ‘the odorant butyl mercaptan diluted to a concentrated of 0.3 parts per billion’. What is the odorant butyl mercaptan? It smells like rotting eggs and is added to household gas to aid in the detection of leaks. The usual figure for how many different odours humans can detect is 10,000. But Olofsson punctures that, although there is still no definitive answer. ‘We can probably distinguish as many smells as we can colours – millions of them.’ Humans will never beat the sniffing powers of a dog, because dogs have superior physiological capacities (slits in the nose that send air to the side, not forward; nostrils designed for better smelling; a wet nose that lets it know which way the wind is blowing). Even so, Olofsson gives it a good try, getting on his knees and sniffing the base of a tree in his local park.
Smell only came to its proper place in human consciousness when it disappeared. The loss of a sense of smell was one of coronavirus’s most shocking symptoms. People suddenly found food to be meaningless (taste and smell are so linked, it is hard to tell the difference between ketchup and mustard if you hold your nose). This was definitely a physiological loss. Smell and physiology are intriguing enough: many Icelanders have a gene variant that makes them more tolerant of rotting fish. The book is a brisk journey through the past ten years of smell science, probably the most exciting smelly period for hundreds of years, and the revelations keep coming like, well, a bad smell.
The most fascinating revelation may be the power of association. Olofsson sympathetically skewers the notion that there is such a thing as chemical sensitivity. Sufferers, he writes, show high levels of anxiety and it’s not clear which condition precedes which. The cure for chemical sensitivity is not to live in a bubble but to book some cognitive behavioural therapy. Overweight people smell calorie-dense foods differently. ‘An obese person may… find that a light yogurt tastes worse than a higher-fat yogurt, while a normal weight person finds the taste equivalent.’
There is also a ‘firm link between odour disgust and political attitudes’. People who are drawn to authoritarian leaders are less tolerant of body odour. Olofsson’s lab found that ‘people who are easily disgusted – let’s call them “thin-skinned” for now – tend to dislike contact with strangers, and they are particularly afraid of contracting diseases’.
It is insights like these that may compel you to hope, as Olofsson does, for a ‘smell revolution’. Every smell, he writes, is ‘an interface between our thoughts and our emotions… a meeting place for the present, childhood and the beginning of life’. He hopes his readers will become nosewise. I’m in.
The ghost of his father haunts Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be content with things as they are.’ Aged 56, Churchill was singularly discontented with things as they were. He was out of office and out of favour with his party, and had already entered his ‘wilderness years’.
There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life
Because My Early Life was published in 1930, there are many people, places, literary allusions, historical events and even words – nautch-girls, marplots, Uitlanders – that require explanation for today’s reader. Professor James W. Muller of the University of Alaska has produced no fewer than 1,450 editorial notes to the text, which explain everything. It is a feat of erudition and scholarship in which he was helped by the late Paul Courtenay.
There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life, written at a time when he felt that people were focusing too much on private concerns rather than public ones. It is a hymn to the sense of noblesse oblige that actuated him and many of his contemporaries. Some of the chapter titles brilliantly convey the adventures it recounts, including ‘The Sensations of a Cavalry Charge’, ‘I Escape From the Boers’ and ‘The Relief of Ladysmith’. Yet there is also a good deal of self-deprecation in the book, and little of the vainglorious boasting of which his modern detractors accuse him.
Another powerful insight into Churchill’s psychology, especially as it was affected by his father Lord Randolph Churchill, is afforded in the short story ‘The Dream’, which Muller has also annotated in the volume. This strangely whimsical piece, written in 1947, recounts a meeting between Churchill and the ghost of his father, who visits him while he is painting a portrait of Lord Randolph. The ethereal figure appears to Winston in his studio at Chartwell in Kent and they have a long conversation; but at no stage does Winston tell his father that he has become a success in life, and indeed has been instrumental in winning the second world war. Randolph departs in a puff of cigar smoke, believing that his son has only been a moderately successful newspaper reporter, and does not learn that his own fame, as a short-lived chancellorship of the exchequer, has been entirely overshadowed.
During their conversation in the story, Winston touches on the changes and political developments that have taken place in the half century since Randolph’s early death in 1895, which emphasise how unimaginable the 20th century would be to someone from the late Victorian age. The Boer War does not surprise Randolph, of course, but socialist governments, the female franchise, MI5, the two world wars (‘We have had nothing but wars since democracy took charge’), 18 per cent income tax, the Holocaust, Stalinism and nuclear bombs leave him ‘stupefied’. Churchill also makes his father say ‘I loved you dearly’, whereas the truth was more complex.
Though written 78 years ago, ‘The Dream’ appears to contain a message for our times when Winston tells his father:
It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near. A war of the East against the West. A war of liberal civilisation against the Mongol hordes. Far gone are the days of a settled world order.
But Churchill, being an optimist, did not end the story fatalistically, instead saying: ‘Having gone through so much, we do not despair.’
There are other delightful touches, as when Lord Randolph tells his son, who, at 73, was still leader of the opposition: ‘You are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I wonder that you didn’t go into politics. You might even have made a name for yourself.’ Of course the story can also be seen as a form of humble-brag, but both it and the autobiography are superb pieces of writing.
Muller is methodically working his way through the Churchill oeuvre, having already edited The River War, Great Contemporaries and Thoughts and Adventures. Once he has finished, he will have done Churchill scholarship an invaluable service by opening up the great man’s works to a whole new audience. My Early Life’s original dedication ‘To a New Generation’ still stands.
A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed
Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became.
Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her grandmother
Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir. The Visitor, her only novella, written in her late twenties when she was working as a journalist in Manhattan, remained unpublished in her lifetime. It tells the story of 22-year-old Anastasia King, who, after her mother’s death, returns from Paris to her grandmother’s house in Dublin, which had been her childhood home. Christopher Carduff, the editor of Brennan’s posthumously published works, describes it as a ‘ferocious tale’ of love longed for, ‘perverted and denied’. In 100-odd pages, it is utterly brilliant and icy – a story that leaves you chilled to the bone.
Arriving home, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be slowly and steadily spurned by her grandmother. Mrs King lives with her housekeeper, Kathryn; she visits her son’s grave daily and is unable to forgive Anastasia’s mother (and by extension Anastasia) for having run off to Paris. There is no comfort in Mrs King: she is ‘lonely, satisfied and closed’. A visitor in her own home, Anastasia feels a ‘deep shame’. Her grandmother’s rigid dislike is as remorseless as the dark that pervades the first third of the book on almost every page.
Mrs King is similar to other obsessive women who feature in Brennan’s stories – the priest’s mother in ‘An Attack of Hunger’; and Min, the twin sister, in ‘The Springs of Affection’, who feels her brother’s marriage to be an act of betrayal. In The Visitor, we are taken into Anastasia’s consciousness as it shifts between present and past, reality and dream, hope and despair. Although she’s the protagonist, nothing really happens to her. Deprived of a home, she’s also deprived of a story; she becomes the victim of a rigid Irish culture of emotional and sexual repression, dominated by the Catholic church.
The tale that Miss Kilbride, Mrs King’s elderly spinster friend, tells Anastasia is a warning. After a youth spent at the beck and call of a bedridden mother (who refers to her daughter as ‘Other Self’), she describes her secret Tuesday nights’ romance with the ‘long-lost hero with whom she had struggled in valiant, well-dressed immodesty on a small settee, for love’s sake’.
Brennan has been largely neglected in Ireland. No Irish newspaper carried an obituary when she died in New York in 1993, destitute, alcoholic and homeless. How ironic, then, that a commemorative plaque was unveiled at her childhood home in Ranelagh, Dublin, 30 years later. In 2023, Peninsula Press (London) also issued her short stories, and later this year will publish The Long-Winded Lady, her witty New Yorker sketches. Perhaps Maeve Brennan is home at last – her literary reputation finally secure.
This other Eden: Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queirós, reviewed
When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’
Saramago might have been taking his cue from the man he considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. While serving as a diplomat in Britain, Cuba and France, Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) savaged clerical hypocrisy and national backwardness in what are now considered canonical realist doorstoppers. And a century before Saramago, he caused a similar ruckus with Adam and Eve in Paradise.
The novella, published in 1897 and now translated into English for the first time, revisits Christianity’s first man and woman, departing from the Creation story in ways both playful and profound. Adam’s birth and discovery of paradise in the first of the story’s three parts underlines that this is an Eden of contrasts. It is at once intimate and vast, sensuous and red in tooth and claw, with ‘linting marble rocks blushing warm and pink’, while oxen and deer lock horns ‘with the dry crack of oaks felled by the wind’.
Later, Eve, given ‘wide, lustrous, liquid eyes’ by God, saves her sleeping partner from a pack of animals keen to kill any prospect of humanity (and thus their subjugation), before the pair establish a kind of primitive domesticity, learning to hunt, cook and make clothes in an increasingly hostile place. Meanwhile, repeated references to their roles as ‘our Father’ and ‘our Mother’ come up against allusions to Darwinian theory, to which the narrator is sympathetic.
This edition, which lacks any commentary on Quierós’s style or major themes, will probably appeal mainly to readers familiar with the writer’s work. But, being a novella, it should also encourage others to try him, not least because all the contrasts, perhaps counterintuitively, form a fine, multi-layered whole. And we are in excellent hands with Margaret Jull Costa – a translator who has perhaps done more than anyone to help the literature of Europe’s westernmost country find an international audience. Despite the gap of time, these pages read fluently, avoiding the Portuguese fondness for overlong sentences and inviting us, with wit and respect, to view Adam and Eve, and origin stories great and small, anew.
Will Trump deport Prince Harry?
To the US, where President Trump is busy making the most of his return to the top job. At his inauguration on Monday, the Republican president was keen to hammer home just how much he wants to change during his time in office – even signing a number of executive orders during the event, to the delight of adoring crowds. From leaving the World Health Organisation to renaming the Gulf of Mexico, President Trump has made it clear he’s here to shake things up. And this could spell trouble for one particular Prince.
The monarch of Montecito could end up Trump’s next target – after the US President vowed to take ‘appropriate action’ if it transpires that Prince Harry has lied about drug use in his visa application. Trump’s intervention follows campaigning by the Heritage Foundation think tank, which began to look into the Duke of Sussex after he confessed in his memoir Spare that he had previously dabbled with drugs – from cannabis to cocaine and even hallucinogenic magic mushrooms. Hardly noble behaviour, eh?
The Heritage Foundation is calling for Harry’s visa application to be made public to expose whether the renegade royal did indeed admit to taking illict substances. The think tank even went so far as to sue the Department of Homeland Security last year to accelerate the process – but the case was blocked by a judge. Now, the election of Trump could pile more pressure on Harry, not least given the US president’s rather hostile attitude towards the royal. The Republican told the Express US before the election: ‘I wouldn’t protect [Harry]. He betrayed the Queen. That’s unforgivable. He would be on his own if it was down to me.’ Ouch.
The new president is known for his hardline attitude to immigration, with Trump also announcing on Monday that he would declare a national border emergency and end birthright citizenship. Will his tough approach extend to Harry? Stay tuned…
Why has Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci?
Joe Biden left it until the last minute to issue a pre-emptive pardon of Anthony Fauci for any offence committed since 2014 in his work on ‘the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House Covid-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.’ Yet surely Covid began in 2019, not 2014?
The significance of 2014 is that this was when the Obama administration responded to anxiety among some scientists about a series of experiments that made influenza viruses potentially more dangerous to people – by banning federal funding for any such gain-of-function experiments.
Yet from June 2014 money flowed from Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to support experimentswhich led to gain-of-functionin Wuhan in China via an organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance. There, SARS-like viruses ‘gained’ the function in certain experiments of becoming 10,000 times more infectious in humanised mice. (Both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance have denied any wrongdoing.)
‘So let me get this straight: Fauci’s pardon goes all the way back to 2014, the year he started funding the labs that eventually helped create the chaos we’ve all been living through,’ wrote the science journalist Dr Simon Goddek on hearing news of the pardon.
Fauci hotly denied to Congress that he had ever funded gain of function experiments in Wuhan, telling senator Rand Paul ‘You do not know what you are talking about’. Heclaimed that one particular narrow definition of gain of function did not apply in this case because it did not include animal viruses, only human ones. Besides, the EcoHealth president, Peter Daszak, wrote an email in 2016 to Fauci’s colleague saying ‘we are very happy to hear that our gain of function research funding pause has been lifted’ (my emphasis).
Senator Paul was pulling no punches on Monday: ‘If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the Covid pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal. As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee I will not rest until the entire truth of the coverup is exposed. Fauci’s pardon will only serve as an accelerant to pierce the veil of deception. Ignominious! Anthony Fauci will go down in history as the first government scientist to be preemptively pardoned for a crime.’
As Paul hints, this is not the end of the matter. Biden’s pardon applies only to federal prosecutions, not state ones. And it also makes it harder for Fauci in any congressional hearings to ‘claim the Fifth’ since he could not implicate himself in a crime for which he is immune. More generally, the pardon seems to imply guilt. The Biden White House says not, but then the Biden Justice Department said a few months ago that ‘accepting a pardon from Donald Trump is “a confession of guilt” for your crimes’. They cannot have it both ways. (Dr Fauci denies any criminal wrongdoing, stating that ‘there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.’)
Had he been prosecuted by the Trump administration, Fauci could have been accused of at least three offences: funding research that was forbidden, some of which may have led to a terrible pandemic, lying to Congress about it and covering up evidence to obscure the origin of Covid.
His emails and testimonies relating to the early months of the pandemic appear to reveal a consistent pattern of trying to deflect attention from the possibility that the outbreak began with an accident in the very Wuhan laboratory his agency had had funded. In those early weeks, remember, people thought the epidemic would probably blow over and be soon forgotten rather than pored over by investigators for years.
A few days before the pardon was announced, Peter Daszak and EcoHealth were officially debarred from receiving future federal funding on the recommendation of Congress. Daszak was fired by EcoHealth at the same time, perhaps so he could receive severance payments, which resigning would not allow.
There is something approaching full-scale panic in the American scientific bureaucracy at what the Trump administration may reveal in the coming months about what went on in Wuhan with the support of American grants and American expertise.
What Rishi Sunak did next
It wasn’t so long ago that political commentators and Tory MPs alike were confidently predicting that Rishi Sunak would leave No. 10 and head straight for California to start a new life. In his final appearance at the despatch box for Prime Minister’s Questions, Sunak made light of the rumours as he teased MPs that he was ‘happy to confirm reports that I will now be spending more time in the greatest place on Earth’… before going on to clarify that he’d be in his constituency in Yorkshire.
Today there are more details of how Sunak really plans to spend his time on the backbenches. In a statement from ‘The office of Akshata Murty and Rishi Sunak’, it has been announced that the former prime minister will shortly take up roles at his Alma Maters Oxford university and Stanford as part of their World Leaders Circle. Announcing the news, Sunak said:
I’m delighted to be joining the Blavatnik school of Government at Oxford and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Both Blavatnik and Hoover do superb work on how we can rise to the economic and security challenges we face and seize the technological opportunities of our time.
At least Sunak will get some Californian sun for now on his trips to Stanford. While Sunak plans to stay put in parliament, Tory MPs expect some of their colleagues to quit before the next election. ‘A lot of the former ministers are desperate to go,’ explains one old hand. Who will be the first?