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2675: Over the Sea – solution
The journey was that of the Owl and the Pussy-cat, by Edward Lear. OWL appears diagonally backwards in the bottom right of the grid.
First prize J. McClelland, Bangor, Northern Ireland
Runners-up Paul Elliott, London W12; Rex Anderson, Coleraine, Northern Ireland
Has the assisted dying lobby considered the guillotine?
My young friend Dr Cajetan Skowkronski has helped me resolve a question that has been worrying me. Why do supporters of ‘assisted dying’ insist that the best method is a cocktail of pills (or intravenous injection)? Their prescription has an air of medical respectability, but this is not a medical process. The sole aim in assisting suicide is to achieve the quickest, least painful death. In a Twitter thread of Swiftian brilliance, Dr Skowkronski has the answer: ‘At the height of the French Revolution,’ he writes, ‘when large volumes of Assisted Deaths were taking place for the sake of noble aims, a compassionate physician, Dr Guillotin, felt that many of the prevailing methods were cruel. [He] therefore proposed the use of an accurate and immediate method which spares the “patients” so many of the regrettable sufferings associated with other therapeutic options such as hanging, shooting, axing, burning or dismemberment.’ After ‘extensive trials’ in France, this ‘was adopted in many progressive countries’. Dr S feels that ‘As a 21st-century physician motivated by the same compassion… I see that prevailing “best practice” in jurisdictions where euthanasia is legal [is] inhumane, slow, and carries unacceptable complication rates’. He therefore urges that advocates of assisted dying be trained in ‘operating portable, modern guillotines to give their patients the very best care with instant effect’. Obviously, ‘Guillotine stigma is a hurdle we must overcome…But think about the stigma we have already overcome by reframing Doctors Killing Patients as an act of compassion which we now call Assisted Dying. Let’s execute change, together.’
Even if it were established that the net effect of the British Empire on people of African origin was negative, because of slavery, and even if the reparatory sums involved could be computed, and even if the living victims could be correctly identified, and even if the British taxpayer could afford reparations – hypotheses which pile Pelion on Ossa – a further question would remain. Do reparations work? Their most famous effect came after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. There was little doubt that Germany’s aggressive war had caused appalling death, damage and expense to the victorious allies, so the cause of reparatory justice seemed strong. (‘Make Germany pay!’) Unlike in the case of slavery, the German case was current, with evidence available from the living. But people soon realised that reparations were crushing German recovery, making payback impossible and producing a grievance on which extremist politicians fed. After the second world war, therefore, the victorious allies (well, the western ones) saw the recovery of a prosperous, democratic Germany as their task. If Germany was not collectively punished for its murderous Nazi oppression of a continent immediately after it happened, what possible case could there be for trying to gouge money out of Britain now for a trade that was stopped the year after the death of Pitt the Younger?
From this week, there will be legally enforced ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics to prevent anti-abortion protestors distressing their customers. It certainly is unpleasant that demonstrators try to intimidate people of whom they disapprove, but few anti-abortion protestors use such tactics. Besides, the police should prevent all intimidation without special legal protection for one particular group. Last week, a pro-Palestinian mob set itself up right outside JW3, a north London Jewish community centre at which I have spoken in the past. Jewish people visiting their centre had to run the gauntlet of people screaming ‘Turn another Zionist around’, just like Arthur Scargill’s pickets in the 1980s shouting ‘Scab, scab, scab’ at miners trying to enter their pits. Why does the government want to protect abortion more than Jews?
In the 1980s, a new era in the life of museums began when the V&A decided to advertise itself as ‘an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’. It was a sort of joke; but, then again, it wasn’t. Something in the zeitgeist decided that cafés reign supreme. Ever since, attempts to emphasise the primary functions of cultural institutions have been made to look dowdy compared with the provision of skinny lattes. In this column in July, I wrote about the management of the London Library, which is determined to build a café on its top floor without ascertaining what its 8,000 members, of whom I am one, really want. Coffee mania goes with a certain politics, so it is perhaps superfluous to add that the library’s bust of Thomas Carlyle has been removed from display. Carlyle had undeniably unpleasant racial views, but he equally undeniably founded this amazing institution with the noble motive of accumulating thousands of books for serious study. For that he should still be honoured. There is now a movement among members who feel the café is being imposed upon them without it being clear how the money will be found, whether it will damage the budget for books and/or hike up the already very high membership fees. They do not want the library turned into a club, but to stick to its rule that it is a library for research. Its AGM is on 26 November. It seems that members will not be allowed to debate the café project in full on that occasion. If that proves the case, the critics want to call an extraordinary general meeting, and for that they need signatures. Any member who wants to help should contact Nicholas Pickwoad on librarymatters2024@gmail.com.
Hedgehogs have been redefined as a ‘near-threatened species’. The published reasons for their decline include habitat loss, depleted soil and pesticides. I wonder if another factor has been considered: where badgers multiply unculled, hedgehogs have a way of disappearing. Our neighbour, the great conservationist Philip Merricks, says he has ‘live trapped’ and redistributed more than 1,000 hedgehogs since erecting a badger-proof fence round his reserve.
Rachel Reeves is taking us back to the 1970s
The first fiscal event to be delivered by a female Chancellor of the Exchequer is a landmark moment, but in every other regard this Budget was a return to the familiar, and failed, approach of Labour governments past. This was the Life on Mars Budget – a journey back to the 1970s, only without the cheap booze and fags. Tax rises, increased borrowing, a bigger state, spending on public services unaccompanied by meaningful reform and additional costs for those businesses which create wealth – we have seen all these before and we know they are the markers of decline.
This Budget was a journey back to the 1970s, only without the cheap booze and fags
Before the election there were signs that Labour’s leadership understood the need for a different approach. In a speech to the Resolution Foundation in December last year, Keir Starmer declared: ‘Anyone who expects an incoming Labour government to quickly turn on the spending taps is going to be disappointed.’ He appeared to understand that investment in the public realm should come not from increasing an already historically high tax burden, nor from borrowing when public sector net debt matches the entirety of the nation’s GDP. Instead, he argued, ‘growth must become Labour’s obsession’. It was acknowledged that only by liberating the private sector, maximising wealth creation and encouraging entrepreneurship would economic growth come which would, in turn, fund eventual investment in public services.
But now Labour seems to be setting out in almost the opposite direction, saying it is necessary first to spend, extravagantly and indulgently, in the public realm and if that requires businesses to pay more, then they should do so with a light heart. The means chosen – a rise in employers’ national insurance contributions – is defended on the basis that this is not a direct raid on the income of working people. But it will mean fewer people working and downward pressure on their wages. Raising taxes in this way may reflect an obsession, but not one with growth.
Other increases – whether the imposition of VAT on private school fees, alterations to the capital gains tax regime or changesto inheritance tax – can perhaps each be defended on their individual merits. But, cumulatively, they bear upon individuals who merit being treated with care because of their huge contribution to the exchequer.The wealthiest 10 per cent of taxpayers contribute 60 per cent of all income tax. The top 1 per cent pay 28 per cent. The 60 highest earners in the country contribute £3 billion in income tax revenue. Public sympathy for these individuals is limited, but what is not limited is their capacity to withdraw their capital, income and expenditure from the UK economy and the reach of HMRC. The evidence that not just plutocrats but also young entrepreneurs and talented figures in the tech world are relocating to jurisdictions with lower taxes and better climates is already concerning. That capital flight can only accelerate after this week.
The Chancellor clearly hopes that public sector investment, made easier by the relaxation of her borrowing rules, will provide the capital which really drives long-term economic growth. And the case for improving the nation’s infrastructure is compelling. House-building has lagged behind household formation for years, travel into and between our major northern cities is pitifully slow, and domestic energy generating capacity is well below what a modern economy requires. Faster house-building, major transport improvements and energy abundanceare all prerequisites for any increase in the trend rate of GDP. But, as pointed out by Samuel Hughes, Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood in the brilliant recent report ‘Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated’, the real challenge in delivering infrastructure across the UK comes in attracting more private sector investment, not expanding public spending. Public expenditure, after all, hasballooned on both HS2 and the Hinkley Point nuclear reactor, without any consequent improvement in national productivity.
Unlocking private sector investment in infrastructure requires a level of reform not yet attempted, indeed barely hinted at, by the government. The planning reforms so far floated may drive welcome additional house-building on greenfield sites, but the major blockers to development are the tangle of restrictions which spring from retained EU law, judicial review, the habitats directive, species licensing, carbon budget obligations and other environmental protections. A government obsessed with growth would take a scythe to them. But will this government, with so many other battles to fight, want to be seen as waging war on nature?
History tells us that the appetite of any government for radicalism only abates over time. So if growth really were this government’s obsession then the steps to accelerate it should have been taken this week. Instead another course has been chosen. A radical one, in its way, certainly. Tax, spend, borrow. Privilege the public sector over the private, favour increasing expenditure over structural reform, choose state direction of investment over markets freely allocating capital. Rachel Reeves has fired up her Quattro, but it’s heading straight for a brick wall.
Portrait of the week: Tax rises, a cheddar heist and snail delivery man gets slapped
Home
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, repeatedly mentioning an inherited ‘£22 billion black hole’, raised taxes by £40 billion in the Budget, while saying she was abiding by Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase taxes on ‘working people’. A big hit came from increasing employers’ contributions to national insurance; the threshold at which it begins to be paid was reduced from £9,100 to £5,000. But income tax and NI thresholds for employees would be unfrozen from 2028. Capital gains tax went up; stamp duty for second homes rose. Fuel duty would again be frozen. The non-dom regime was abolished. Tobacco went up; a pint of draught went down a penny. The minimum wage would rise. Defence spending would rise by £2.9 billion. The bus fare cap in England was raised to £3. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, rebuked the Chancellor for announcing in America new fiscal rules (confirmed in the Budget). ‘The premature disclosure of the contents of the Budget has always been regarded as a supreme discourtesy to the House,’ he said.
Mike Amesbury, MP for Runcorn, was suspended from the Labour party after footage showed him punching a man in the street in Frodsham, Cheshire; a witness said that they had been discussing a swing bridge over the river Weaver. Manchester United sacked Erik ten Hag as manager. A boy had fallen ill after being handed bread by Sergei Skripal to feed ducks in Salisbury on the day in 2018 that Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with novichok, an inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess was told. A dustcart burst into flames near Oxford Street in London. Twenty-two tons of fine cheddar were stolen from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London.
Axel Rudakubana, aged 18, accused of murdering three young girls in Southport, was additionally charged with a terrorism offence, as the government had been aware for some weeks. Tommy Robinson was jailed for 18 months for contempt of court for repeating false claims against a Syrian refugee. Three migrants died when their boat sank in the Channel and another man drowned four days later. In the seven days to 28 October, 1,663 migrants in small boats arrived in England; the number so far this year surpassed the 29,437 for the whole of 2023. A man from Bolton who used AI technology to turn photographs of real children into ‘depraved’ images was jailed for 18 years. AI was used to recreate the voice of Sir Michael Parkinson for an interview podcast series.
Abroad
Israel is to ban Unrwa, the UN’s Palestinian aid agency, from operating in the country and the occupied areas under its control. Israel struck targets in Iran, in retaliation for an Iranian barrage of missiles launched on 1 October. Four soldiers were reported to have been killed by the Israeli attack. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, said the attack should not be ‘exaggerated or downplayed’. Israel said its forces had detained 100 terrorists at Kamal Adwan Hospital inside the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. Israel made an air strike on the town of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. The Lebanese health ministry said at least 60 people had been killed in Israeli attacks on the eastern Bekaa Valley.
North Korean troops were operating in the Kursk region of Russia where Ukrainian troops had a foothold, Nato said. The ruling Georgian Dream party gained a majority of 53.92 per cent despite exit polls indicating a win for four opposition parties; President Salome Zourabichvili of Georgia said the election had been ‘totally falsified’. The long-ruling Liberal Democratic party lost its majority in the Japanese parliament after a snap election called by Shigeru Ishiba, the Prime Minister, who took office in October. President Emmanuel Macron of France told Morocco’s parliament that Western Sahara should be under Moroccan sovereignty. More than 50 died in Spanish floods. England lost the Test series in Pakistan 3-1 after being bowled out for 112 in their last inning.
In the civil war in Sudan there were reports from the central state of Gezira of the mass killing of civilians by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Zhang Yiming, co-founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, became China’s richest person with a fortune put at £38 billion. The Pope published an encyclical called ‘Dilexit Nos’ (‘He loved us’) on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Alex Ikwechegh, a Nigerian MP, apologised after a video circulated of him slapping a man who had delivered some snails, saying: ‘I will slap the hell out of you.’ CSH
Will Keir Starmer get me banned from football games?
Last Saturday, I made the 400-mile round trip to Burnley with my 16-year-old son Charlie to see Queens Park Rangers play the Clarets. Quite a long way to go, given that Burnley was one of three teams relegated from the Premier League last season and are expected to go straight back up, while QPR are struggling to remain in the second tier. Nevertheless, we managed to hold them to a goalless draw, which the visiting fans celebrated as if we’d just won the FA Cup. ‘Worth the trip,’ declared Charlie as we embarked on the four-hour train ride home.
The cabinet of killjoys can’t stand the fact that the beautiful game hasn’t been captured by the puritans
I treasure these day trips with my youngest, crisscrossing the country to watch our beloved Rs, but there may not be many more. I don’t just mean that he’s getting older. I’m also thinking of the Football Governance Bill, resurrected by Sir Keir Starmer after falling by the wayside in the last parliament. Among the reams of red tape it will impose is a requirement that all clubs submit a ‘corporate governance statement’ to the newly created Independent Football Regulator that will explain ‘what action the club is taking to improve equality, diversity and inclusion’ (EDI). All this in the name of ‘protecting’ fans, if the government’s rhetoric is to be believed.
Judging from the behaviour of Newcastle United, this clause will do everything but protect fans. In fact, it could result in tens of thousands being banned from attending games because their political views put them at odds with their club’s EDI policy – which I imagine will include me. Last year, Newcastle slapped a two-season ban on a fan called Linzi Smith because she’d expressed her belief in the biological reality of sex. Now, if she’d marched up to a trans woman at a football match and told them that trans women cannot be women, perhaps the club might be justified. But Linzi aired her views on X, not at St James’ Park. Turns out fans are expected to comply with Newcastle’s ‘trans inclusion’ policy outside the ground as well as in.
The free speech advocacy group I run is helping Linzi challenge this decision in court, but if she loses I fear Newcastle’s policy will become a blueprint for the rest of the English Football League. That’s particularly likely when Labour’s Employment Rights Bill is passed, which imposes a legal duty on employers to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to protect their employees from being harassed by third parties – which in the case of football clubs means an obligation to protect their staff from overhearing disagreeable opinions expressed by fans. Not just chants, mind you, but so-called inappropriate jokes and problematic banter. Once that becomes law, banning people like Linzi from attending games on the grounds she might say something that upsets a trans employee might be considered a ‘reasonable’ step.
So what’s the government’s rationale for forcing football clubs to beef up their EDI policies? To find that, you have to go back to the ‘independent fan-led review of football governance’ produced three years ago by Tracey Crouch MP. Almost a tenth of the report is taken up by the chapter on EDI and among its arguments for ‘improving diversity’ is that a more diverse workforce will drive ‘better business decisions’. What’s the evidence for this? Why, it’s the ‘research’ done by McKinsey and Co, which purports to show a correlation between ‘diversity on executive teams’ and profitability. Unfortunately, this research was debunked by professors Jeremiah Green and John Hand in an academic journal this year.
Not that this collapse in the evidence will make the slightest difference, obviously. The business case for imposing this smelly little orthodoxy on the national game was only ever a fig leaf. The real reason is that equality, diversity and inclusion is the holy trinity of the new national religion. And don’t be fooled into thinking it’s about helping ‘oppressed’ minorities – that too is smoke and mirrors. It’s about punishing fans like Linzi – classed as ‘privileged’ by the high priests of this new cult, even though she’s working-class – for not toeing the line.
One of the things I love about football is its out-of-school quality – that sense of freedom you get when you enter the stadium. It’s an opportunity to let off steam, to role-play in a pantomime of sectarian conflict that ends as soon as the game is over. It’s surely no coincidence that the summer riots stopped as soon as the football season began. But Starmer and his cabinet of killjoys can’t stand the fact that the beautiful game hasn’t been fully captured by the scolds and puritans. Hence the Football Governance Bill. They’ll cancel Christmas next.
The Battle for Britain | 2 November 2024
The glaring mismatch in English football
Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself to a half-time pie and a mug of Bovril if you said Howard Wilkinson, who took the First Division championship with Leeds United in 1992, the final season before the formation of the Premier League. Since then nothing: now the top four teams in the country are managed by a Spaniard (Guardiola at Man City), a Dutchman (Arne Slot at Liverpool) and two more Spaniards (Mikel Arteta and Unai Emery at Arsenal and Villa). The only three English managers in the top flight are Eddie Howe at Newcastle (currently 12th), Sean Dyche at Everton (16th) and Gary O’Neil at Wolves (19th). Of the two national teams, the women are managed by Holland’s Sarina Wiegman and the men by the freshly arrived new boy from Germany, Thomas Tuchel, though he won’t be unpacking his bags till January.
The power and wealth of the Premier League clubs mean they are unwilling to take a chance on a novice Englishman
So what is going on here? Are there no English managers of international stature? Spanish managers might dominate the Premier League but there sure as hell aren’t any English bosses in La Liga. In elite European club football no English manager has won the Champions League or its predecessor for 40 years. Unlike the previous eight years from 1977-84, when English managers won the trophy seven times. Now the grim-faced politburo who run Manchester United have iced the long-suffering Erik ten Hag, but you can bet your mortgage his successor won’t be English. The favourite is the highly regarded Portuguese Ruben Amorim, riding high at Sporting Lisbon. Partly, the enormous power and wealth of the Premier League clubs and their owners mean they are unwilling to take a chance on a novice Englishman. Partly also there are too few coaches coming through the English system, just a fraction of the number in Spain holding Uefa’s top coaching qualifications. The best overseas managers, like Guardiola or Brentford’s Thomas Frank, have sports degrees too. Rather than some hokum about a football regulator, wouldn’t the government be better off trying to help English football sort out this glaring mismatch?
What an utterly dismal performance by England in the last two Tests in Pakistan. And how superb were Pakistan, especially their two spinners and their batsmen patiently accumulating big runs. England seemed to be disrespectful of their opponents, marching down the wicket and trying to whack the spinners into Kashmir; and contemptuous of the (relatively few) English fans who had taken the trouble to flog out there, only to see England humbled.
When even the Chef himself, Alastair Cook, said with more than a trace of disapproval that he couldn’t have batted like anyone in the England team – all seemingly incapable of dogged defence – because that was not how he was brought up, then perhaps something is wrong. Look at Saud Shakeel, who patiently built a score of 134, mostly in ones and twos, and steered Pakistan to a decisive first innings lead of 77. So what is going on? From what you see at club level and hear about ECB pathways, coaching seems to resemble the catastrophic teaching philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s: anything goes, there are no wrong answers, structure is oppressive, self-expression is paramount.
Some of the impulse behind this is positive (getting athletes to ‘buy in’ to the process) but it sometimes feels like a free-for-all. And so you see under-11s reverse sweeping before they can play a cover drive. Is this why our elite players seem to lack some of the traditional attributes like patience – and play in such an arrogant way? The Stokes/McCullum team is packed with talented players. Here’s hoping they can play in a way that allows those talents to flourish.
Dear Mary: How do I stop my boss sending me rambling voice notes?
Q. I am a concierge for a high-net-worth individual. She likes to communicate with me mainly via WhatsApp voice messages and it’s not unusual to receive ten of these a day. The messages are often lengthy and I find it tedious having to listen carefully right to the end in case I miss some vital instruction. For example, she might be talking about the dinner she went to the night before but embedded within her ramblings could be: ‘By the way, could you get the plumber back urgently to the London flat – water is leaking from the basin in my bathroom.’ How can I tactfully ask her to waste less of my time?
– J.L., London SW11
A. You mustn’t. She is paying you to make things easier for her and if she enjoys rambling about her life, it’s your role to be interested rather than resentful. However, were you to download a transcriptor for WhatsApp you would find that reading a message takes, on average, a quarter of the time it takes to listen to. You could even print the messages out and highlight the necessary actions to ensure you are super-efficient.
Q. I will shortly be attending a house party abroad and my host has informed me that a fellow guest will be on the same early flight. He has shared their contact and suggested we liaise for taxis on arrival. My problem is that I am always dishevelled and stressed at airports and will be in no mood to engage in pleasantries at five in the morning. I fear that contacting him in advance might result in our meeting up on the Stansted Express and therefore the hours of forced company would mean we would surely have exhausted all conversational topics before we even arrive. I do not want to appear rude or standoffish, though, by not making contact.
– H.F., London SW7
A. Your fellow guest almost certainly feels the same. Most travellers value private time at airports for the purchase of forgotten items and the sending of last-minute emails. Once you are sitting on the plane, send a friendly text saying you look forward to meeting them and sharing a taxi when you land. In this way you can preserve your conversational battery.
Q. A friend always manages to leave something behind when she comes to stay. She seems to feel no guilt when she asks me to post whatever it is back to her and never offers to pay postage. – H.S., Winchester, Hants
A. Next time you might prompt her empathy as she departs by saying, affectionately: ‘Don’t bother leaving a tip. Just give me the cash and I will use it to pay for the postage of whatever you’ve left behind this time!’
You’re spoiling us: The Ambassadors Clubhouse reviewed
The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting. There was an avant-garde café under the Heddon Street Kitchen called The Cave of the Golden Calf. Ziggy Stardust was photographed for his album cover outside No. 23; from Heddon Street you could hear the Beatles play their final concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969.
This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated food and it is all superb
But that is over. Heddon Street now has the awful sheen of the gormless tourist London which Richard Curtis invented, entirely unconsciously. It is still Victorian, but the brickwork is over-pointed, and the windows over-washed. It could be Diagon Alley at the Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden, or the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. It could be anywhere.
Its function is to be the café for the mall that is Regent Street, but that is central London now. Whole districts are hotel complexes with amenities, and they feel like it: they have the lifelessness of parts of Venice. Heddon Street has occasional plants, not trees, and a zigzag of grey paving, not granite. It feels constructed, as if in a rush for TV. It also has Gordon Ramsay’s Heddon Street Kitchen; Ziggy Green, named after Ziggy Stardust (do aliens eat?); the Starman public house (do they drink?); Piccolino for Italian cuisine; Fonda (Mexican); and the Ambassadors Clubhouse, which has gained a home but lost its apostrophe on the way.
You might think it is modelled on the Hans Holbein painting in the National Gallery – skull, Madam, or Ferrero Rocher? I would dine in this restaurant in a heartbeat, but this is Punjabi food from JKS Restaurants, three siblings and the owners of Gymkhana. I’m not keen on Gymkhana, even if it has two Michelin stars: the colonial nostalgia is overcooked, and the chicken undercooked. The Ambassadors Clubhouse is far better, but the owners’ grandfather was an ambassador, and this is a tribute to his ‘party mansion’ – the copywriter’s phrasing – in northern India. At weekends there is a nightclub – Ambassy – in the cellar for people who are not like me.
A party mansion means chaos: bright swirled carpets, faux Egyptian pillars, chequered glass panels, golden orbs for lamps, extremist woodwork. It is eye-melting kitsch, and I like it. Come for the set lunch, I think as I enter: £35 a head for three courses, or, by my spiteful new calculation, Pret A Manger times three. Bring sandwiches from home the other two days: these are basic life skills, reader.
It is close to being a themed restaurant, which means the food matters more, not less: what use is a nymph in a toga if they screw up garlic bread? This is ‘the food of the undivided Punjab – India and Pakistan’, which means there is nothing Anglicised here. You will not find a bright yellow or red curry wearing what is essentially gravy. This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated food and it is all superb. We eat masaledar lamb biryani, which feels like a king’s dish (£28); til masala aloo, a potato curry (£11); bhindi dali kadi (£20), a chickpea curry; dhaba dal (£11).
The clubhouse offers a lot of alcohol – you could spend thousands here just on gin. Instead, sinking to decadence, we spend £28 on four glasses of lemon shikanji. Despite its grandeur, this is more friendly than Gymkhana, which had all the hubris of the over-fashionable restaurant. Come here before it meets the same fate.
Does ‘tummy’ turn your stomach?
‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising language has already made poo the normal way of talking about excrement.
Now it’s tummy. Last week the manager of Arsenal admitted that choosing a team sometimes gives him a ‘bit of tummy ache’. There is even an outfit called the Happy Tummy Co, which bakes bread that is said to be easily digestible.
It is not as though stomach was particularly indelicate. Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury was happy to claim ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, though she might have hesitated to refer to her bottom (coming in at that time as a less forthright term than arse).
Tum and tummy both appeared in the 1860s. W.S. Gilbert, before his partnership with Arthur Sullivan, had a hit with his humorous Bab Ballads, first published in Fun, a rival to Punch, in the 1860s. In 1867, one featured, in a dreamlike way, the fatal adventures of a Turk in Sussex, with Gilbert’s grotesque illustrations (a little like W.M. Thackeray’s or Richard Doyle’s). Called ‘The Fatal Tum’, it included the phrase little tummy.
The most famous tum of the era belonged to the Prince of Wales, Bertie. His Marlborough House set nicknamed him Tum Tum, though not to his face, except in the case of Sir Frederick Johnstone. Sir Frederick was behaving obstreperously one day in the billiard room at Sandringham, as Jane Ridley tells in her biography of Edward VII, when Bertie put his hand on his shoulder: ‘Freddy, Freddy, you’re very drunk.’ To this Sir Frederick was said to have replied: ‘Tum Tum, you’re very fat!’ Their friendship ended. That might be true, despite resembling the even less convincing drunk-ugly exchange attached to Winston Churchill and Bessie Braddock in 1946. But no one is ugly now, and they’re obese, not fat, however great the circumference of their tummy.
My bid to be chancellor of Oxford
I have spent the past couple of weeks in Oxford rediscovering the art of conversation while campaigning for election as the university’s chancellor. I have sung for my supper in Christ Church Cathedral before being questioned in the SCR on my fitness for the role, and I performed again at evensong at Univ before debating postcolonial reparations over vegetable broth and venison. I have been gifted cyclamens following visits to St Hilda’s and Corpus. At St Hugh’s my understanding of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was taken apart by the law don, while at Worcester I was challenged on the state of Britain’s naval hard power and the FCDO’s soft power. I debated ethics and AI at Balliol and health data anonymity at Reuben, while at LMH I was reminded of my overnight occupation of the Examination Schools in my first term at St Catherine’s in 1973.
The race for the chancellorship is a strange, atomised, largely virtual experience in which it is almost impossible to identify, let alone communicate with, anyone who has a vote. Student encounters, high-table dinners and visits to science labs have been rewarding, and thankfully the race has been remarkably free of mudslinging by the candidates. An early portrayal of me as a partisan figure compared with William Hague by the retiring chancellor, Lord Patten, did not go down well in the university. Charles Moore went further in last week’s Spectator, likening me to Xi Jinping in my desire to ‘project Chinese power’ – a curious claim given my public view that the West needs to combine deterrence with dialogue towards China. But, all told, whatever the outcome, my memories of the campaign will be very positive.
In reality, William Hague and I offer a rather similar view of the chancellor’s role – not just figurehead but global ambassador and fundraiser for the university. Given that the higher education funding system in Britain is teetering and that the financial pressures on government are extreme, I cannot see any alternative to Oxford looking outwards if it is to remain world class. Oxford will always survive because it is too strong to fail. The question is, is it strong enough to remain competitive globally? Oxford depends, both for its teaching and its research, on cross-subsidy from within the university. Current spending is being bailed out from savings accounts which are not growing fast enough. Endowments are nowhere near the size of those in America. So Oxford is going to have to put on its running shoes. This is what the next chancellor will need to focus on, along with the gown-wearing, degree-conferring and after-dinner speeches.
If I am not lucky in my bid, Michael Gove offers a rather attractive alternative role model as editor and broadcaster. He recently delivered a polished performance as presenter of a BBC series called Surviving Politics in which he interviewed me, among others, about survival (and comebacks) in the Labour party and I tried to turn the tables and interview him about surviving Brexit. I had not thought about it before our discussion, but he and I are rather similar. Neither of us came into politics for the ride or to be fence-sitters; both of us have strong core beliefs and do not shy away from controversy. The problem is that, in both our parties, there is an innate conservatism. Tony Blair was a compulsive revisionist, as I was (he once quipped to me that only two people are genuinely New Labour, him and me). Michael was the most effective minister in the last government, transforming significant chunks of the public realm, often against the wishes of his colleagues. I wonder who in this current crop of Labour ministers will challenge orthodoxies and risk their popularity to get things done through meaningful reform as well as increased spending.
Speaking of which, Rachel Reeves is high up in the Govian stakes with a Budget which has had to fix Jeremy Hunt’s black hole, protect public services from further erosion, support wealth creators and unleash investment. Time will tell whether she has made a reasonable start. Knowing her a little as I do, and as a student of Labour history, she will be relaxed about the criticism her tough measures have inflamed. If she was seeking popularity at this stage in the electoral cycle, it would probably be coming from the wrong places. She would do well to remember the remarks of Dora Gaitskell, the wife of Hugh Gaitskell, himself a post-war Labour chancellor of the Exchequer. She told him that ‘the wrong people are clapping’ after a conference speech in which he delighted his audience but did not set the right course for the party.
The reparations racket
I have been trying to interest MPs of all parties in joining my call to persuade Barbados to say ‘thank you’ to Britain for the extra 17 years of life they enjoy as a consequence of their distant ancestors having been forcibly transported, hundreds of years ago, from Africa to the Caribbean. Nobody is quite biting my hand off at the moment, I have to say. They seem to think that the issue is a little ticklish right now.
It would be difficult to make the charge of present culpability stick in any reasonable court of law, surely?
I had mentioned the whole business on last week’s Any Questions? but the audience seemed too appalled even to boo and sat there with their middle-class jaws sagging open, as if they’d just been touched up. I ought to stress I would not be demanding money from the Barbadians – just one of those Hallmark thank-you cards would suffice, plus a promise to stop the relentless grifting and instead to try as best they can to get on with their lives.
Of all the post-rational stuff bought into by the new left, none is more idiotic or corrosive than the slavery-imperialism-racism business. In order to sign up you need to be purblind, utterly ignorant (or maybe just dismissive) of history and logic. And yet so terrified are our politicians of being called racist that they either stay silent or kind of murmur their assent for the whole idea of bunging Barbados a few trillion quid, in addition to the foreign aid the country has received over the years.
It is so easy to refute the notion of reparations that it’s almost not worth the bother – but that’s the hole left open for the lefties and the grifters to crawl through, I suppose. First and obviously, it is not entirely clear as to who should be paying these monies. Is it just the countries who bought the slaves? Does that mean we exculpate those who sold them, such as the various tribes of Ghana and the Bight of Benin? Still more obviously is who in the UK is to blame, if anybody is at all, seeing as everybody involved is dead? At the time this unpleasant practice was taking place, my ancestors were crawling on their stomachs through the pitshafts of the Durham coalfield and were, you might argue, little better off than slaves themselves. They did not benefit – any more than 99 per cent of the country did. I suppose we could trace the lineages of the stinking rich and make them pay up, but it would be difficult to make the charge of present culpability stick in any reasonable court of law, surely?
More pertinent is the question of who the compensation is actually for, and why. Plainly the people who suffered as a consequence of slavery are all dead and therefore would gain nothing from financial redress. Barbados and other Caribbean nations argue, however, that the legacy of slavery still enchains them, although they never actually explain quite how. Perhaps that is because the legacy of slavery has actually benefited them enormously – and this is where the whole argument falls flat on its face.
As I alluded to in that first paragraph, the average life expectancy in Barbados (77.71 years) is more than 17 years longer than that which pertains in Benin (59.9 years), which is one of the principal countries from where slaves were transported. It is also more than 13 years longer than the average life expectancy in the most affluent of the West African nations, Ghana (63.9).
Not only that, but the Barbadians are substantially better off than their, um, donor countries by every conceivable measurement. The gross national income per capita in Benin ($1,400) is approximately 14 times lower than that of Barbados ($19,490), while the figure for Ghana ($2,380) is about one eighth of that which the Barbadians enjoy. It is probably worth pointing out here that the descendants of slaves who now live in the USA enjoy an average income some 40 times greater than that which pertained in the countries from which their ancestors were transported. The same sorts of differentials occur when you look at the comparative Human Development Indices for the countries of the Caribbean and those of West Africa. What exactly are we supposed to be compensating, then – a feeling of pique?
The more frequently deployed argument questions whether it is rational to dredge through the immensely long and incalculably widespread history of slavery and just pluck the UK and the European empires out of the hat and charge them with offences, entirely ignoring the Ottoman Empire as well as all those civilisations which, earlier, imposed slavery upon the British people. This seems especially counter-intuitive when you remember that it was Britain which became one of the first countries to outlaw slavery (Portugal, Haiti and France have similar claims) while the practice continued unabated across bits of the world which we these days call ‘developing’. There is no rationale or logic to this.
But then there is no rationale or logic to any of it. All of sub-Saharan Africa and almost all lefties are united in their belief that imperialism and colonialism are the sole causes of the poverty which exists in Africa today. And yet that canard can be disproved very quickly simply by examining the cases of Ethiopia and Liberia, which share all the same problems as the countries which surround them, including great poverty, but were never themselves colonised. Or compare and contrast with Singapore – a British colony for almost 180 years that now seems to be doing kind of OK for itself.
Indeed there is a good argument to be made, in the case of Africa and the Caribbean, that the later a country gained its independence, the better it is doing today. Compare and contrast Haiti (1820) with St Lucia (1979), for example, or Mauritius (1968) with Liberia (1847). But perhaps we shouldn’t go there. It just makes everybody a little on edge and it doesn’t stop the grifting.
Labour’s new cabinet divide
There were no civil servants present when ministers gathered for their weekly cabinet meeting on Tuesday. The reason? It was time to talk politics. On the eve of Labour’s first Budget for 14 years, Keir Starmer tried to rally his ministers around a common message: blame the Tories! He spoke of the so-called fiscal black hole bequeathed to Labour before he handed things over to his Chancellor to explain why difficult decisions were required on spending, tax and welfare.
Plenty of Labour MPs and aides question the wisdom of an election campaign which has boxed them in
For all the attempts to unite against a common enemy, just a glance around the cabinet table was a reminder of the unease about the decisions taken this week. Ministers such as Angela Rayner, Louise Haigh, Steve Reed and Shabana Mahmood have already expressed their objections to real-term departmental cuts.
Reeves sat opposite Starmer at the end of the table. Within her line of sight was Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury. Reeves and Jones are the guardians of fiscal responsibility – and are fast becoming the least popular members of the cabinet with colleagues. ‘Their standing is pretty low at the moment,’ says a government source after weeks of spending negotiations.
Reeves’s first Budget is seen as evidence of the Treasury’s dominance of the government’s agenda. Jones (who has referred to his three children as ‘cost units’) likes to say his buzzwords are ‘reform’ and ‘growth’, but these days his colleagues mainly associate him with the word ‘no’. Backing them is Reeves’s closest cabinet ally Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, along with Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, who was one of the few winners from the Budget.
These divisions within government could define the next year, especially after the comprehensive spending review which is due in the spring. There’s already talk of a January reshuffle, and a lot will depend upon how the Budget lands in the coming weeks. ‘We won’t really know for a week or so whether it’s OK,’ says a government aide. A Budget that survives contact with reality would cement the Treasury’s authority. One that unravels would embolden Reeves’s critics.
Starmer and Reeves always planned to use the first Budget to make tough decisions in the hope of getting them out of the way before the next election. Their view is that it is OK, for now, to be unpopular. ‘We have five years,’ says a senior government figure.
But others in the party are less relaxed about Starmer’s plummeting approval ratings – the sharpest drop of any prime minister in more than 40 years. ‘If it is still this way in the new year, people will panic,’ admits a government aide. The government’s missteps in its first few months means it had less political capital to spend on Budget day than anyone expected. While ministers point to funding for the NHS to the tune of £22.6 billion and a £2.9bn boost to defence as news they can sell on the doorstep, there’s plenty of other things that Labour MPs will be less keen to talk about.
Reeves has had to balance the needs of three groups: the markets, MPs and voters. Pleasing one lot risks upsetting another. For example, the decision to relax the fiscal rules to allow for greater infrastructure spending has led to a nervousness in the City – the UK’s long-term borrowing costs hit a post-election high just before the Budget. The market response on Wednesday after Reeves had spoken was cautious – with 10-year-gilts surging to 4.39 by the end of the day.
She also risks a fight with the parliamentary party over her decisions to press ahead with the winter fuel payment cut and to maintain the two-child benefit cap. ‘How many Labour MPs will threaten to vote against this?’ asked a worried government aide. The Chancellor hopes to win round disappointed MPs by pointing to the quiet radicalism of the Budget which in the words of one MP represents a ‘generational transfer of wealth and power to workers’.
Despite suggesting for most of the election campaign that there would be no need for tax rises, Reeves has presided over one of the biggest tax-raising events ever, to the tune of £40 billion. The decision to hike employer national insurance could be read as a manifesto breach – but the bigger concern may be whether these measures are good for workers in the long term with the OBR suggesting they could lead to a reduced work force. Businesses see it as part of a series of measures that will hurt the country’s competitiveness. The combination of an increase in employers’ NI, new labour laws and a big hike in the minimum wage is a triple whammy for business.
For the Tories, the tax rises present a big political opportunity to paint Labour as untrustworthy. Starmer and Reeves claim they went into the election with no plans to raise taxes, yet their manifesto was so carefully worded that they have plenty of room to tinker, such as with increasing capital gains tax and adjusting inheritance tax relief.
While the Budget can fairly be branded high tax, high borrowing and high spend, some in the party still worry there is not enough cash to go around. While the NHS is receiving a large boost and there is more money to go on infrastructure, day-to-day spending will rise to just 1.5 per cent per year from 1 per cent under the Conservatives. This is seen by some ministers – particularly those in the unprotected departments – as too close for comfort. Much of the additional spending Reeves announced is for this year with some for next – leading the IFS’s Paul Johnson to suggest the current spending estimates for after then is set to grow ‘implausibly slowly’ – raising the prospect of further tax rises if growth does not improve.
Privately, there are plenty of Labour MPs and aides who in hindsight question the wisdom of an election campaign which has boxed them in. The party promised a triple lock tax pledge on income tax, national insurance and VAT. At the time, there was little dissent. But as ministers are finding that their spending requests are being rejected, some wonder whether it is possible to avoid breaking the manifesto pledges for the rest of the parliament. When they go cap in hand to see Jones, he repeatedly brings up the manifesto tax promises. ‘So much of the counter pitch is: “We made tax pledges, so we are stuck with them,”’ says one figure privy to the conversations.
In the Treasury, there’s a concern that there is a failure to clock the fact that funds are limited. When Jones talks about tax promises, they think he’s imposing imaginary constraints. It was telling that Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, would not confirm in an interview whether the tax pledge would remain until the next election. Reeves also wouldn’t rule out further tax rises in her post-Budget interviews.
The hope in government is that improved growth forecasts and falling interest rates, combined with Reeves’s tax raid, will allow for more spending in the coming years. However, the OBR’s revised growth forecasts are hardly encouraging. Despite the government repeatedly suggesting its number one priority is growth, there it little evidence that this budget will deliver it.
Already ministers are looking ahead to the spending review for better news. The change to borrowing rules on infrastructure also creates an opportunity to spend more freely. However, Jones – who is head of both the spending review and the infrastructure committee – is still reluctant to splurge, especially while the markets are nervous.
What this means is that there is a need for the party to unify and look as though it can make tough choices. The question is whether MPs have the stomach for it. Or as one unconvinced minister puts it: ‘A lot of us are wondering if this is really what 14 years in opposition was all for.’
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Toffee apples: a dangerous food for frightening nights
Bonfire night is more about burning Catholics than haute cuisine and it shows. I’ve always felt for Catholic friends at this time of year, but I am a Jew, and I am told I am oversensitive. It’s also three decades since I made £150 doing ‘Penny for the Guy’ on Hampstead High Street. The last time I went to a bonfire night party it was hosted by a Catholic, and this confused me, until I remembered: she is an English Catholic.
If Christmas is for the goose, and Easter for the hot cross bun, bonfire night has the toffee apple. Because this is a desolate festival, it has neither toffee on the apple – we will get to that – nor, too often, a bonfire. I’m not for burning Guido in effigy like those pyromaniac loons in Lewes, about whom I always think: who will they burn next? But if I go to bonfire night, I want a bonfire, and they are often cancelled because they are dangerous, which is the point of them, and a bonfire night without a bonfire is a Christmas without Christ. The toffee apple suits its festival: you need fire to make it.
As with most famous dishes, the origin of the toffee apple is contested (not as much as better foods, but still). Honey and sugar were used as preservatives in ancient times, and it’s not impossible that sugar was heated to coat the apple. But I like to think wise ancients were more careful of their teeth: a toffee apple can steal a molar and laugh. It’s likely the Victorians knew how to make them, and I found a food blogger who called them a Russian delicacy.
We know this: in 1908, a confectioner called William W. Kolb of Newark, New Jersey, made a series of bright red sugared apples with cinnamon for his Christmas window display. These are candy apples, not toffee apples – you need butter or cream to make toffee. Even so, people liked them. Like Cassandras predicting late-stage capitalism, widespread morbid obesity and misnaming common things, they ate the window display. If this story is true, the toffee apple is an accidental food like the Caesar salad, which was invented in Mexico when a chef had a panic attack. It is also not a toffee apple. It is a candy apple.
Now they are everywhere in autumn, when apples are plentiful. Purists make caramel apples, which are really toffee apples, because they contain butter, or cream. Hunter’s Candy in Moscow, Idaho, sold them from 1936 but, as with the toffee apple that should be called a candy apple, it is likely that they existed earlier. There are variations wherever you find apples: you can add chocolate or nuts and if you are grandiose you can paint them. They were sent to the front in the second world war, alongside salami.
But the caramel apple isn’t the same. Not enough sugar. You want the crack of the sugar, and the sourness of a Granny Smith. A sweet apple cannot be a toffee apple. It makes no sense. Nor can a waxed apple. The sugar slides off. Nor can a soft apple, which collapses. If you make your own, beware. For a toffee apple, the sugar must be heated to 140°C for the desired ‘hard crack’. This is a dangerous foodstuff for frightened nights, and that’s apt.
Martin has worn down my defences
Provence
My older, adopted sister came to stay. She suffers from peripheral neuropathy secondary to diabetes and is registered disabled. It’s a worry watching her negotiate the cliff path and the 12 stone steps to the front door with her stick, but she adores it here. Since reversing her insulin-dependent diabetes with an extreme fasting keto diet, her mobility has improved and she no longer uses a mobility scooter.
My sister got cross when I doubted the veracity of both his ID and love for her
Obesity and diabetes killed her twin brother five years ago this week. He was 62. First he partially lost his eyesight, then sensation in his feet and fingers, and finally his legs. Anthony was a kind soul: a hardworking mechanical engineer who loved his family. When we were younger he and his wife would come to visit for a few days and he’d do blokey stuff such as checking the tyres, radiator and lights on my car and mending things in the house. Even when we were wee he had endless patience for his annoying ginger sister: when I was a baby, pushing my pram round the farmhouse courtyard for hour after tedious hour and later teaching me to play football, fire a bow and arrow, climb trees and shoot an airgun. He was strong, the best gymnast and cricketer in his class and I’ve never seen anyone throw a stone further than he could – or laugh as hard at my attempts. He’s one of the reasons I exercise a lot and occasionally challenge my daughters and pals to arm wrestling tournaments.
We don’t have much in common, my sister and I, apart from our tragic, weird and abusive childhood, but we have great affection for one another. We talk little about the horrors and more about the landscape and people on the periphery of our younger lives. ‘Remember that lady we used to have tea with in Edinburgh? She was like a Scottish Joyce Grenfell.’ ‘Dad’s bridge partner, Peggy.’ ‘I loved going there; nice cakes.’ ‘Yeah but Mum used to tell us we were only allowed one.’ Occasionally, as with most adult siblings, we bicker about a memory. ‘You weren’t there. I told you about it!’ ‘Yes I was!’ ‘No you weren’t’… etc.
Only once in the past 45 years have we got close to falling out and that was earlier this year when she was catfished for a second time. With the help of an online friend of a friend I’ve never met – proving social media isn’t all bad – I outed the first scammer who claimed that he was a widowed Canadian doctor working for the Peace Corps but was, in reality, a Ghanaian fraudster using the photographs of a German engineer. This time it was a widowed American deep-sea diver who, in his early sixties, still travelled the world working, except when he was sailing the huge yacht he part owned, or riding his Harley-Davidson to the Grand Canyon. She got cross when I doubted the veracity of both his ID and love for her.
In the Netflix documentary Sweet Bobby and Me, which I’ve read about but not seen, Kirat Assi, the woman who was catfished for ten years by a female cousin posing as an online lover, expresses dismay at being called gullible and naive. But the words just mean easily persuaded, and some people, like my sister, are more trusting and less worldly and sceptical than the rest of us. After three months of gentle WhatsApp disagreements – me pleading, sending articles and documentaries on the subject – she told me to stop. Following a ten-day silence I got a message from her: ‘Sorry love, you were right. He’s asked me for money. Told me he lost his credit cards in a diving accident off the coast of Mexico… I’ve ended it and reported him.’ ‘Who knew you could tap a card on the ocean floor?’ I said.
But then aren’t we all occasionally susceptible to attention and flattery, especially if we’re momentarily vulnerable or lonely? Early one morning last month, after a gruelling workout, I sat in the doorway on the top step enjoying the view when he came and sat beside me. At first I’d discouraged his efforts at friendship, but we’d got closer over the past weeks. Sitting there side by side felt companionable, pleasant almost, so I said nothing and stayed still. Then he brought his face close to mine and stroked my cheek. A simple touch. After all these months of fending him off – I was lost. I promised myself I wouldn’t let him into my bed.
I don’t even like cats. There are far too many in the village. Driving up to the main road from the car park we have to avoid running over litters of kittens of varying ages as they dart one by one across the track. It’s like a video game. This one is a tabby, about a year old and so tiny, skinny and starving – I had to feed him. A week later in view of his intelligence, geniality, small stature and ability to make me laugh, I called him Martin, after my second favourite writer. Martin Amis was 5ft 6in and in his last book, Inside Story, tells his girlfriend, the fictional character Phoebe, that small men try harder. His namesake certainly does; repeatedly flinging himself at the front door and sliding down it with his claws to get my attention. Sometimes he joins me while I do weights and HIIT. When I was lying on the mat doing oblique crunches he turned his back to me, inches from my face and lifted his tail. ‘You’d better make the most of those Martin… They’re coming off on Tuesday…’
Hands off my empty plastic bottles!
‘Where are my empty plastic bottles?’ I ran around the house screaming, after discovering my stash had disappeared.
The government in Ireland has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers. It has introduced a scheme whereby you can feed all your empty bottles and cans into a machine in the supermarket that crushes them down and spits out a voucher – by which I mean about 20 small plastic water bottles, for example, makes you two or three euros, which is enough for a coffee, a sandwich or some money off your shopping bill.
The government has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers
It’s not really a lot, obviously, but it’s just enough money to have made people lose their minds over it.
Lads can be seen rifling through public bins on high streets. Because I’m thrifty and like a bargain, I can be seen down the Centra in our West Cork village with bags full of these bottles I’ve collected, feeding them into the machine and gasping with delight when I get my slip of paper with a few euros on it. You have to spend these euros in the particular shop where you’re using the machine, but that doesn’t dim the joy of the situation one bit.
It’s all very nostalgic if, like me, you remember saving up R. White’s lemonade bottles and a man coming to collect them and giving you some coins. Coke bottles, too. The young enviro-warriors like to think they’ve reinvented the wheel but they really haven’t. When I was a child we recycled everything and it was much more exciting because it involved pocket money, so it’s great that Ireland is going back to those heady days of turning trash into cash.
Leo Varadkar, before he resigned for getting almost everything else wrong, did at least come up with this bottle-crushing idea, and I would have to hand it to him, it’s the dog’s do-dahs. So (leaving aside the immigration rows, and the riots, and the rejection of his attempt to edit the word ‘mother’ out of a Roman Catholic country’s constitution) he got something right. Or did he?
I was going great guns with it, then my parents were staying with us, and I had a huge bin-load of small water bottles saved up.
But one day they disappeared. I got all itchy-scratchy because, you have to understand, I am now thoroughly addicted to the process of feeding bottles into a machine and hearing the crunching, and getting my ticket. There’s a lovely pause where you wait for it to work out how much you’ve got and then it spits out the receipt… Ooh! Three euros and 50 cents! It’s exciting. Of course, I wouldn’t infer that living in the back of beyond at the tip of an Irish peninsula with nothing but cows for miles is boring, but I will say feeding bottles into a machine for a few euros passes as a day out.
So I ran round the house shouting at everyone about where my bottles had gone, because I was looking forward to taking them, and my father sloped out of the living room where he and my mother were busy boiling themselves alive, as old people do, with all the radiators full on and a roaring fire, and he said the fateful words: ‘Oh them? I burned them.’
My father is a liberal leftie who bangs on about the environment, Gaza, Ukraine, ‘our NHS’, the lot. And there he was, burning plastic in my fireplace.
I went berserk and gave him a stern lecture, which he declared himself totally unbothered by because he’s used to ignoring me, because I’m a mad anti-vax conspiracy theorist in his view.
It took another two weeks before I had the bin full of mineral water bottles by the door again, ready for me to take to the machine. I was salivating every time I walked past it.
I kept adding more bottles until the bin was overflowing and I had to put them all into a massive clear plastic sack that some building materials had come in. You can tell this isn’t going to end well, I’m sure…
One day, the builder boyfriend went down to the village for a few essentials. And when he came back with a shopping bag containing milk, cornflakes, chocolate, he patted his pockets and said: ‘Oh, I got you a five euro token for all those bottles. Now where is it?’ And he went on patting pockets, then turning out pockets. And token came there none.
‘What the hell!’ I screamed. ‘You took my bottles!’ There followed the most dreadful scene. It was possibly the worst argument we have had in nearly 15 years together.
Five euros was the most I had ever saved up. And he had lost the ticket. And I hadn’t even had the pleasure of feeding the bottles into the cruncher.
I screamed, I insulted him, I blamed him for everything, way beyond plastic bottles. If we hadn’t been unmarried, I think we would have got divorced over it, and he’s still barely speaking to me. So Leo Varadkar can get the blame for that as well.
My fears for the National Hunt Chase
World politics is dire but so long as Mick Herron is writing spy novels, David Mitchell is raising laughs and Bukayo Saka is scoring goals there is joy available and I have lived to see the start of another proper jumps season at the Cheltenham Showcase meeting. Saturday’s racing did, however, provide a sharp reminder of how the Irish dominated last season’s Cheltenham Festival, winning 18 of the 27 races, including 12 of the 14 Grade One contests. Irish trainers Ian Patrick Donoghue, John McConnell, Gordon Elliott and Henry de Bromhead won four out of the seven races, and you have to wonder how hard some home-based handlers are trying when only one of the five runners in the William Hill novices hurdle came from an English yard. Even the ever-combative Paul Nicholls, 14 times our champion trainer, didn’t have a single runner on the card.
Allowing professionals into the National Hunt Chase will make it just another novice handicap chase
One positive for home fans was the victory for his nephew Harry Derham’s Givemefive in the Masterson Holdings Hurdle, his first at Cheltenham. Harry made good use of his six years as assistant to uncle Paul and started training on his own in 2022. Last year, at 25 per cent, he had the highest strike rate of winners to runners of any British jumps trainer. After Givemefive had scooted past Dodger Long and the odds-on Irish-trained favourite Bottler’secret he confirmed a neat piece of race-targeting: ‘We brought him in two weeks early from his summer break with just this race in mind. He was found by my cousin Megan and has been a fabulous little horse.’
The Showcase Meeting was a first chance to discuss with jumping aficionados the slate of changes being made to the future Festival programme, including the Turner Novices Chase losing its Grade One status and becoming a handicap as will the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase. Most seem ready to live with those changes but plenty seem to agree with me that allowing professional jockeys, as well as amateurs, to ride in the 3m 6f National Hunt Chase marathon is a sad move, especially since it was announced without any consultation with the Amateur Jockeys Association. My worry about officialdom’s constant tinkering with the race programme is that too much attention is paid to framing contests the bookmakers want to increase betting volumes on, and too much is done for ‘image’ reasons to help quieten the voices of those who will never go racing and would like to see the sport shut down altogether. Some changes to the Grand National – such as softening the cores of fences, moving the start further from the crowds and stiffening the qualifications for those allowed to run – have improved horse and rider safety. But reducing the maximum number of runners from 40 to 34 has produced a sanitised Grand National lite. We seem to have forgotten all about the history, tradition and ethos which help to give character to races and I fear that allowing professionals into the National Hunt Chase, a Festival ingredient since 1911, will make it just another novice handicap chase.
Many happy memories are centred around the National Hunt Chase. Along with the Kim Muir and the Hunters’ Chase, it has been an excellent chance for leading amateurs to display their talents and in many cases to help tune them up into turning pro. Mouse Morris won the race for Edward O’Grady on Mr Midland the week before he did so and Jamie Osborne was second in it just before taking the same step. Looking back through its past participants you see every corner of racing represented. Regular contestants included the great John Lawrence, later Lord Oaksey, John Thorne and Marcus Armytage, who won the National on Mr Frisk. There were future Grand National-winning trainers like Nick Gaselee, Oliver Sherwood and Nigel Twiston-Davies, as well as leading figures from the Flat like James Fanshawe and Ian Balding, who won the race in 1963 as a Cambridge undergraduate on Willie Stephenson’s Time. Stephenson’s winners rarely went unbacked and soon after the race he handed the surprised winning rider an envelope which turned out to contain £300. Michael Dickinson, who went on to be a leading jockey and the trainer who trained the first five horses home in the Gold Cup, won it as a 17-year-old in 1968. In 2010, Katie Walsh became the first female winner, beating her future sister-in-law Nina Carberry, and I haven’t forgotten Willie Mullins, Mr Cheltenham himself, telling me of the scare he had before winning the National Hunt Chase on Hazy Dawn in 1982. Turning for home, he said: ‘I got the fright of my life because I couldn’t see any fence. I thought “Cripes. Am I after taking the wrong course?”. This whole thing went through my mind. I think it was the way that the sun was shining off the stand or a shadow blocked my eyesight. It was probably three seconds but it felt like ten minutes.’ Luckily the fence reappeared just in time for Willie but I fear that handing over the National Hunt Chase to the pros risks taking away substantial chunks of future racing history.
Bridge | 2 November 2024
The World Bridge Games are taking place in Buenos Aires and I’m glued to my screen, kibitzing and checking the results at every opportunity. The superstars are out in force, and it’s riveting to compare the way they approach the same hands – and a great way to learn. That said, you’ll see certain bids which you probably shouldn’t try to emulate: their instincts and imaginations are on an altogether higher plane than most of ours. Indeed, I saw a number of bids which, if anyone I teach had made, I’d have ‘corrected’ at once!
Representing the USA in the Seniors Teams, for instance, Zia Mahmood (South), picked up ♠️J ♥️-♦️AKJ107643 ♣️AK82. When East opened 1♥️ he passed! West jumped to 3♥️ and when the bidding came back to Zia, he sprang to life with 4NT (showing both minors). When his partner bid 5♣️ he jumped to 6♦️. Could there be a more beautiful way to show both minors with longer, solid diamonds? He was obviously void in hearts, so it wasn’t hard for his partner to raise.
Another legend, the Polish player Michal Klukowski (representing Switzerland), also made an odd-looking bid on this hand against France (see diagram).
Every other West transferred into hearts and EW either ended up in an unmakeable 3♥️ or 4♥️, or else allowed North to play in 3♦️. Klukowski decided that 3NT was the best shot at game. How right he was! South led the ♠️Q, and when North played the ♠️7, East, Jacek Kalita, played a deceptive ♠️8. You can hardly blame South for continuing the suit – and Kalita had his nine tricks.
The strange silence around the Southport attacks
There are certain rules in British public life that are worth noting. Such as this one: if someone is killed by a jihadist or someone who could plausibly be connected to immigration in any way, the British public will not be informed of the possible motive – or at least not until it becomes impossible to conceal it any longer.
It was revealed that the attacker was of Rwandan heritage, at which point people said: ‘Nothing to see here’
Certain rules follow on from this. One is that ‘wise’ heads will inform anyone who does mention a likely motive that they must be exceptionally careful not to prejudice any forthcoming trial. There then comes an insistence that there will be a time and a place to debate these things. Quite often, that time and place never arrives.
We have seen this enough times now, from the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby to the murder of Sir David Amess; from the Ariana Grande concert attack to the Taylor Swift dance class massacre. This last has come back to the fore with a suggestive revelation this week. Readers may recall that back in July a maniac went into a children’s dance workshop in Southport and started knifing the participants. Three young girls – Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar (aged six, seven and nine) – died of their injuries. Many others had life-changing wounds.
For the time being, it is safe to say that such horrors are relatively uncommon in the UK. We do not have such attacks on a daily basis, so it is inevitable that as well as being angry, the British public might be curious about how such a grotesque and unusual attack could occur. But the police seemed strangely unwilling to release any information. And this is when people can surmise something with considerable accuracy: if the attacker had been a far-right extremist of the kind we are told is so common in our country, and had shouted ‘I’m doing this for Oswald Mosley’, then we would have heard about it. If the attacker had said ‘All Taylor Swift fans must be killed’ we might also have heard of it. But there was silence.
Eventually there was a coy statement that Sky News and other media eunuchs were all too pleased to report – which was that the suspect was from Cardiff. ‘Ah,’ we might all say, ‘a typical Welshman.’ Except that nobody does think that. People knew that there must be more. Soon it was revealed that the attacker was of Rwandan heritage, at which point all the anti-speculation people said: ‘You see, nothing to see here.’ After some furious googling, these same people pointed out that Rwanda is a majority-Christian country and that in any case the suspect was the child of immigrants, and not a recent arrival on an illegal boat. Meaning that the identity of the attacker didn’t matter, because one dogma of the multicultural state is that once you are in Britain you become as British as roast beef, whether you originated here or not.
When the name of 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana was released, the eunuch media had another trick, which was to publish a picture of the suspect many years earlier as a young schoolboy. Not as young as his victims, but still young.
By this point, angry protestors were on the streets of numerous cities. Some people violently attacked a police car, a police station, a mosque and a hotel that was housing illegal immigrants. It was disgraceful and a number of people were promptly sent to prison for this. But others were arrested because they had ‘speculated’ on social media about the attacker or spread ‘false news’ implying the attacker may be Muslim.
Then this week, after a conveniently long period of time, some more information finally came out, including the fact that the suspect was in possession of al Qaeda training manuals and had tried to make the deadly toxin ricin. These are telling details and are important for Rudakubana’s trial. But the authorities must have known this months ago – indeed, within hours of getting into Rudakubana’s house – meaning that people who were heavily criticised for spreading ‘fake news’ about the potential motive of the attacker now turn out to have said something that seems likely to have been true.
If one was to be cynical for a moment, one might say that the police and government knew that the slaughter of three girls under the age of ten at a dance school in Southport is an emotive matter for the general public. It is the sort of thing we do not like. And so because the public cannot be trusted with facts the authorities seem to have once again decided that the public must not be given the facts. The only problem with which is that the public is not as stupid as the authorities seem to think.
Like many other people I look forward very much to the day when we get to find out where the truth really lies. Meanwhile, the question of what to do with the deeper underlying problem will doubtless once again be postponed until someone else is in charge of the country and the situation is worse.
Which brings me to the Conservative leadership race. By the time many readers get to this column, you will know who has won. But here is a thought. Both Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch have allowed much of the conversation about the historic and unsustainable levels of immigration (legal and illegal) in our country to be limited to whether or not we should leave the ECHR. It is strange, because many of our European counterparts, including France and Italy, who are also signatories, regularly ignore the ECHR and deport people whenever they like. They also know that in any case the current laws and conventions are unfit for societies that are fraying badly under the strain.
It will need more than legal tinkering to address this problem. The Starmer government hopes it can get through it by locking up anyone who notices the problem. Anyone hoping to form the next Conservative government should realise that it is too late in the day for that. And that ‘cannot’ is a word that sovereign governments should ignore.
How quickly would Trump wash his hands of Ukraine?
For American politicians, all wars are two-front wars. There is a hot battlefield somewhere in the Middle East or the South China Sea, and there’s a political battlefield in Washington, D.C. The domestic contest is decisive. The same goes for Europe. With Joe Biden riding into the sunset and the presidential campaign drawing to a close, American interest in Ukraine is winding down, too. Europeans talking tough about ‘standing up’ to Russia had better be prepared to do so on their own.
The next president will find the domestic pressure to scale back involvement in Ukraine irresistible
Donald Trump’s campaign message, muddled though it is, bodes ill for the Ukrainian war effort. His patience with this war would not extend 24 hours into his presidency, he warns. For J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, the Ukraine war is a mistake the United States should wash its hands of. How much of Ukrainian territory can be regained in any peace negotiations is Ukraine’s problem, not America’s. The Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has a vaguely pro-Ukraine position – one that she has barely mentioned since September. There is a reason for her silence. Americans are no longer as emotional about Ukraine as they were when Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv in February 2022, and half the country called Russian aggression a ‘major threat’. This summer, a Pew Center poll found that just a third feel that way. Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal found that Americans prefer Trump’s Ukraine policy to Harris’s, by 50 per cent to 39. The US ambassador to Nato, Julianne Smith, announced that Washington did not plan to invite Ukraine to join the organisation any time soon.
The Ukrainian cause has got wrapped up in the part of Biden’s agenda that is most ruthless and least popular. In his State of the Union in March, Biden compared his situation with that of Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, when ‘Hitler was on the march’. His own problem was more complex, Biden boasted. He faced Hitler’s modern-day equivalents not just abroad, in the form of Putin, but also at home, in the form of his own domestic opposition. ‘Freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time,’ he said. The Republicans voted to arm Ukraine last spring, but cannot be expected to do so again – not least because Democrats wove extravagant partisan narratives about Russia’s ‘collusion’ with the 2016 Trump campaign (for which an exhaustive two-year investigation found no evidence).
With each passing week since 2022, the Ukrainian cause has become more a partisan engagement, less a national one. Republican neoconservatives like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham have lost influence. Volodymyr Zelensky has ever fewer Republican fans. The conservative talk-show host Tucker Carlson complained that Zelensky visits Congress to solicit money ‘dressed like the manager of a strip club’. When Zelensky visited a munitions plant with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro this autumn, Trump spokesmen accused him of interfering in the presidential election.
Since the summer, Ukraine has been tied into a broader complex of issues that drove Biden from the presidential race. Defending Ukraine is costing the US hundreds of billions of dollars at a time when its border with Mexico has been left undefended. As in Britain, America’s Ukraine policy has been carried out through a campaign of war propaganda extravagant enough to undermine the government’s reputation for truth-telling more generally. Ukraine, probably the most corrupt country on the European landmass, is presented to the public as a model democracy. Government pronouncements wildly exaggerate the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian casualties. Officials echo Keir Starmer’s judgment that Russia is using its conscripts as ‘bits of meat to fling into the grinder’, as if Ukraine is not doing the same. Frequent allegations that Russia uses ‘misinformation’ to ‘destabilise’ and ‘divide’ our democracy are repurposed for stifling domestic dissent, and discredit the notion of disagreement itself.
The Ukraine war has left the West at high risk of a world conflagration, at a time when the public has little reason to trust that the President has the mental acuity to judge the signals right, or that it is even he who is doing the judging. The Biden administration has been run, in the President’s cognitive absence, by a junta of special interests. In September the US and UK considered using ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles to strike deep into Russia. Such a shift in policy posed insane risks, which neither government (particularly the UK’s, it must be said) appeared to understand.
The problem is not that the West was butting into Ukraine’s launch decisions. The problem is that Ukraine cannot launch these missiles on its own. They require western radar and targeting. Their use would thus have been a direct Nato attack on Russia, which remains the world’s most heavily armed nuclear power. Yes, the West has participated in missile attacks on Crimea – not terribly wise, either, but at least its insistence that Crimea is part of Ukraine provides it with a fig leaf under international law. It remains a dangerous situation, which the Zelensky government has every incentive to escalate, particularly as its own military loses momentum on the battlefield.
The Ukraine war does not appear in the same light at the end of this presidential campaign as it did at the beginning. Be it Harris or Trump, the next president will find the domestic pressure to scale back US involvement irresistible. Harris’s foreign policy team includes a number of veterans of the Obama administration. Obama helped to calm the Russia-Ukraine conflict, mostly by withholding arms, a decade ago. The region was at peace under Trump, too. Not because he threw his weight around, as he falsely boasts, but because his administration was admirably disinclined to internationalist hubris and human rights messianism. History will liken Biden’s foreign policy to that of George W. Bush, another strange interlude when a mood of world-shaping ideological fanaticism briefly overtook the traditionally pragmatic Anglophone powers.