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Dear Mary: Should you flush the loo in the night when staying with friends?
Q. We live in an area with no mobile reception and trying to get hold of taxis for guests leaving late at night or early morning after a party is nerve-racking. We have only two local taxi firms, both of which stop working after 10 p.m. When taxis from outside the area try to find the house, the signal drops as they near and they can’t find us. What do you suggest?
– A.E., Pewsey
A. Put a warning on your invitations that since taxis will be unable to find the house, guests should screenshot your enclosed map, send it as an aid to the taxi firm and agree a precise time for collection. However, as seasoned party-givers will know, many guests are too air-headed to take in such useful instructions. You might take a tip from another regular host, who lives in a signal-free area of East Sussex. She now books in (pre-paid) local youths to drive disorganised guests home to locations within 30 minutes, saying that ‘the cost to the host is not a huge amount compared with the cost of a party’.
Q. We are having a big party later in the year. My problem is that I currently dread other social events as tactless friends who have been invited mention the party in front of people I haven’t asked. How should I get out of this embarrassing situation?
– Name and address withheld
A. Say to those friends: ‘You mustn’t tell me any more. It’s meant to be a surprise for me!’
Q. My friendship group has reached that time in life when they don’t want ‘things’ as birthday presents as these will clutter up their homes. I am now at a loss to know what to take to birthday parties. Any ideas?
– J.L., Suffolk
A. Bulk-buy bottles of superior olive oil to take to birthday events. Considering the recent price hike, it will be gratefully received, and as it is consumable, it will not be a dust-gatherer.
Q. I have just been a holiday guest at a Scottish lodge. There were seven of us in various bedrooms but we all shared one bathroom. Could you advise the best procedure if one has to use the loo in the night: is it better to flush and risk waking up the lighter sleepers amongst the party – or not?
– S.H., London SW6
A. If number one is involved, people would rather rest undisturbed even at the risk of being confronted during the night by a lightly used loo. In the unlikely event of your needing to expel number two, you should deal with such a bio-hazard immediately and flush and be damned.
As good as Noble Rot: Cloth reviewed
Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson here and, for BBC1, jumped off the roof of the hospital. If Cloth calls itself a ‘neighbourhood wine bar’, which sounds less threatening than ‘restaurant’, its true customers are the dead, and that is no criticism.
The chips are marvellous, and this matters. I always judge a restaurant on the chips
I am early, so I sit in St Bartholomew the Less – this is how buildings fight! – and learn that Inigo Jones was baptised here, and that the warden – a chatty man – likes to play the wireless in the church, a pleasing eccentricity. ‘That’s the Police,’ he says, helpfully, when I say good night. Then I sit in the gaudy, brightly lit pub on the corner of Cloth Fair as a storm blows in. This is where I might complain about the absence of people in the City, but it adds to its charisma at night. Anything could happen. Of course, what will happen is that I will eat at Cloth and get the 46 bus to Hampstead. But it feels like I mightn’t, and that’s the alchemy of a good restaurant.
Cloth is the ground floor of a house that used to belong to John Betjeman – another plaque, they outnumber live residents – and now belongs to the Landmark Trust, who rent it to tourists who treat it like a shrine. If you don’t know the Landmark Trust, you should. They have a thatched castle in Dorset, which is unique even for English architecture: a self-hating fortress.
Inside, Cloth is Ebenezer Scrooge’s parlour. It has dark walls; wood floors; silver candlesticks; interesting art. It is busy because, fellow critics say, the menu is small, simple and doesn’t lie about sustainability. Human breath fogs the windows, as in a fairy tale: not enough of London is like this. It is Georgian pastiche – it must be, syphilis doesn’t sell – though I wonder why, when restaurants travel in time, they always stop here. Tudor was ruined by Charles Laughton, it is true, but what did Queen Anne, and the Incas, do? It must be the familiarity: Cloth’s ideal diners live in houses like this, or they want to.
It was founded by wine importers. You can drink all day if you need to, but the kitchen closes in the afternoon, as serious kitchens do: they still provide snacks for alcoholics, and the hungry. We eat: a pretty buffalo mozzarella salad with walnut, chicory and truffle; superb Westcombe Dairy salami, dense and lovely; Dorset crab and white cabbage salad; cured seabass with tomatoes and lovage; agnolotti of ricotta, roasted onion and sausage; Cornish monkfish, mussels, leeks and manzanilla; and marvellous chips. (This matters. I always judge a restaurant on the house wine and the chips.)
This food is loved, skilled and styled like a Vermeer and so, for me, Cloth is as good a London restaurant as Noble Rot. I would advise, as with all newly-fashionable restaurants, to dine early or late: at 8.30 p.m. it is so full as to feel reckless – we had to wait in the eerie pub, which was fine considering what happened when we were finally seated – but I can’t imagine a more charming place to eat at 10 p.m., ideally in a storm.
The prix fixe at lunch is £24 for two courses (white onion soup, Longhorn bavette) and £29 for three (add peach sorbet). With a meal at Pret a Manger, a restaurant so aggrieved it has lost its circumflex, wobbling dangerously at £13 I can only say eat here: with all the ghosts.
The meaning of ‘moot’? It’s debatable
In Florence there was a stone on which Dante sat in the evenings, pondering and talking to acquaintances. One asked him: ‘Dante, what is your favourite food?’ He replied: ‘Eggs.’ The following year, the same celebrity-hunter found him in the same place and asked: ‘With what?’ Dante replied: ‘With salt.’
In the Piazza delle Pallottole in Florence skulks a lump of stone bearing a label declaring it the genuine Stone of Dante. It doesn’t look very comfortable but at least it explains the line in Browning’s ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ where he says: ‘This time we’ll shoot better game and bag ’em hot – / No mere display at the stone of Dante, / But a kind of sober Witenagemot.’
The Witenagemot was one of several kinds of meeting or moot enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxons. In the 16th century, moot was the name for an exercise in debate at the Inns of Court. The name was revived in the 19th century.
This gives us a moot point: one that is debatable. But a reader, Anthony Whitehead, has found moot in a different sense: ‘academic’ or ‘irrelevant’. He noticed the new meaning in J.K. Rowling and blames her.
He is on to something. Alex Massie in the Times used the familiar sense: ‘It is a moot point whether or not social media encourages paranoia and hatred.’ In the new sense, James Cleverly, when asked on Today whether he would vote for Donald Trump, replied: ‘I am not an American citizen so it is a moot point.’ He didn’t mean ‘debatable’, he meant ‘irrelevant’.
Miss Rowling cannot be blamed for the new sense, for it originated in 19th-century America, where it is now the usual meaning. One can see how it developed: a question suited to a moot was regarded as academic, not real. When George Washington wrote in 1779 ‘The policy of our arming slaves is in my opinion a moot point’, he meant it was debatable. He certainly didn’t mean it was academic.
Portrait of the week: Keir Starmer’s free clothes, Huw Edwards sentenced and Tupperware faces bankruptcy
Home
Sir Keir Starmer met Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, in Rome and said that sending funds to Tunisia and Libya ‘appears to have had quite a profound effect’ in cutting the number of migrants arriving in Italy. In the seven days to 16 September, 1,158 migrants arrived in England in small boats; eight drowned off France. Sir Keir made a late declaration of gifts from Lord Alli, a Labour donor, including clothes for Lady Starmer. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, defended the practice, saying that prime ministers ‘do rely on donations, political donations, so they can look their best’. Sir Keir’s hair was observed to be greyer than before.
About 780,000 pensioners in England and Wales are expected to lose their winter fuel allowance because they will not manage to apply for benefits they are entitled to, according to an estimate by the Department for Work and Pensions. Junior doctors in England belonging to the British Medical Association union accepted a 22 per cent pay rise over two years. Lord Darzi, the former Labour health minister who had produced a report on the healthcare of London in 2007, presented a damning report on the National Health Service, finding that although hospital staff numbers had increased since the pandemic, the numbers of appointments and procedures have not; that there was a serious lack of capital investment; and that long waits in A&E were likely to be causing an additional 14,000 deaths a year. The Prime Minister responded in a speech saying, ‘It’s reform or die,’ and declaring that the NHS would receive ‘no more money without reform’. Inflation remained at 2.2 per cent. The Guardian was in talks to sell the Observer to Tortoise Media. Norman Ackroyd, the etcher, died aged 86.
Huw Edwards, the former BBC newsreader, was given a suspended six-month jail sentence after pleading guilty to three charges of ‘making indecent photographs’ by receiving 41 illegal images mostly of children aged 13-15. The magistrate remarked: ‘You did not keep them and you did not send them on to anyone else.’ One of the beneficiaries of the government’s early release scheme was charged with sexual assault after an incident on the day of his release and recalled to prison pending trial. Glasgow agreed to host a reduced version of the Commonwealth Games in 2026, with the backing of the Scottish government.
Abroad
President Vladimir Putin said that if western countries allowed Ukraine to use their long-range missiles to strike Russian territory: ‘This will mean that Nato countries, the USA and European states, are fighting with Russia.’ President Joe Biden and Sir Keir Starmer kept their counsel on the matter after a meeting in Washington. Russia revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats it accused of spying. Russia and Ukraine exchanged 206 prisoners of war. Fire affected the town of Toropets in Russia after a Ukrainian drone attack on an ammunition store.
Three thousand members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah were wounded and at least nine killed when their hand-held pagers exploded. The Greek tanker Sounion, carrying a million barrels of crude oil and hit by Houthi missiles on 21 August, was towed to a safe area in the Red Sea without any spill. With 12 million people displaced, the World Health Organisation said, famine was widespread in Sudan, where since April 2023 there has been civil war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces; the United Arab Emirates denied supporting the RSF with money and guns. China decided to raise the statutory retirement age from 50 to 55 for women in blue-collar jobs, and from 55 to 58 for women in white-collar jobs; for men the increase will be from 60 to 63.
The American Secret Service spotted a rifle poking out of shrubbery at Donald Trump’s golf course while he was playing. They arrested a man, Ryan Routh, 58, who was charged federally with possession of a firearm as a convicted felon. ‘Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies,’ the Pope said when asked about the US elections. ‘You must choose the lesser evil.’ Tupperware filed for bankruptcy. The rapper Sean Diddy Combs, formerly Puff Daddy, aged 54, was charged with racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. Dominique Pelicot, aged 71, admitted in an Avignon court to drugging his wife and recruiting dozens of men to abuse her for more than ten years. Bangladesh enforced its ban on the export of the fish hilsa to India. CSH
I’m engaged!
I slept only between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m, thanks to self-induced terror tactics. My son Adam stayed over, having offered to accompany me for my angiogram – or ‘the procedure’. He kindly moved my old Honda Jazz round the corner and parked his car in my space overnight. The procedure revealed that a) I am impossible to sedate – I once told a full joke under anaesthetic; b) I am neurotic; and c) I didn’t, after all, need a stent. So why was I so breathless? Could it be because, at three score and ten… er… plus eight, I find myself in love? Prescription: I must walk more, breathe more, change medication and cool it.
Adam came back to check on me and rebuked me for moving my car – which I hadn’t, because the doctor said that I shouldn’t drive for a day or two. The car had, of course, been hot-rodded and nicked. I phoned 101 and frankly the call was more harrowing than the angiogram. One hour on hold and I needed more sedation. The algorithm gave me a crime number and I gave the algorithm short shrift.
I went to the Mayfair launch of a book about cooking and the crown by Tom Parker Bowles. It was hot and I was overdressed. (Isn’t everyone wearing layers now? Yes, Maureen, but not a whole knitted sheep.) The Queen gazed fondly at her son’s delightfully ditsy speech with exactly the same ‘Aww, bless’ look on her face I sported when I realised my son might have left my stolen car’s window open. Later that night my partner David and I decided to tell our children that, with a combined age of 156, we are going to get married. In truth I had been rather against the ‘M’ word, but on a train coming back from Edinburgh he mentioned that it was the minor festival of Tu B’Av – a day when a Jewish woman can ask a man to marry her. Unable to resist the gag, I slid under the table separating us on to one knee and asked him for his hand. To my surprise and slight panic, he gave it.
My late, great husband Jack Rosenthal’s birthday would have been on 8 September. So, armed with a birthday cake, we set off in David’s car to tell first my kids, then his about our engagement. Suddenly my phone rang. ‘Hello, this is the Metropolitan Police here. We just found your car today in Chippenham Road.’ (Five minutes from my flat.) ‘Oh gosh, thank you. Is she OK? Was she… peed in? No, I mean, don’t worry I’ll be there in a minute.’ We reversed and headed off at 20 miles an hour, as you do these days in ‘no Khan-do’ London, and found two officers, one warm and twinkly, and one tall, dark and gorgeous, picking three or four damp and blurry parking tickets off the windscreen of my abused car, which was in an induced coma and required a procedure. David went home for jump leads.
Even though the car had been flashing hazard lights for three days, people came out of houses and offered us tea. It felt like the 1950s. We’d never had it so good. The road where we waited was narrow, so we decided, on David’s return, that rather than re-align all our cars, he would plug the leads straight from their police van to my engine. However, this caused the first crusty behaviour of the day from other drivers. ‘Oh, right, so that’s what the Met are offering these days is it? Servicing celebrities?’ ‘Not botherin’ catchin’ any villains today then? All right for some!’ ‘You’re blocking the effing road, you arseholes!’ The cops were impeccable – patient, smiling and interesting. And, improbably, one of the officers, whose surname was Hussein, turned out to have a Jewish mother. They’re both coming to the wedding.
As David turned the car round again, we saw a double rainbow. We drove to the four separate houses of his three grown-up children and his youngest brother to drop the bombshell. All reactions were warm, and all were individual. One child said that he needed time ‘to process it’. We broke the news to another as he slid leaves into a new dining table, transforming the scene into a Jack Rosenthal play – one with, I like to think, a happy ending. Driving home at 10.30 p.m., we realised that we were starving. Restaurants and pubs were tipping out. There was a dip in temperature, so we pulled up at the crêperie stall in Hampstead high street and bought two rubbery cheese and mushroom crêpes, which we ate too quickly in the car, with the bum-warmer heating switched on. That night, with the help of Gaviscon, I slept like a teenager.
Labour vs labour: how can the government claim to be promoting growth?
Growth, growth, growth: that was what Keir Starmer told us would be his government’s priority in his first press conference as Prime Minister. Nearly three months on, as the Labour party heads into its first conference in power for 15 years, it is becoming ever harder to reconcile Starmer’s promise with the policies that his government seems determined to deliver.
With junior doctors voting to accept a 22 per cent pay rise, yet another group of public sector workers has been lavished with financial reward without any obligation to accept or implement more productive working practices. The NHS is in the midst of a pay bonanza at a time when productivity in the health service has been declining. Since the pandemic, ever more employees are delivering significantly fewer treatments. As NHS England admitted recently, productivity in acute medicine is still down 11 per cent on pre-pandemic levels.
Labour has promised employees flexible working, but employers are offered nothing but pain
It is the same issue on the railways, where train drivers – already among the best-paid groups of workers in the country – have been awarded a 14 per cent increase over three years, again with no conditions attached. Where James Callaghan spent much of his time in office reminding workers that pay rises must be earned through productivity gains, and Tony Blair would insist that extra money had to come with reform, Starmer has shied away from the subject altogether.
Britain is supporting a sprawling government machine whose employees are no more productive than they were when Blair came to power 27 years ago, according to the Office for National Statistics. The tax burden is the heaviest in modern history and the rising cost of government is one of the biggest pressures facing households. And yet a Labour leader who does not come from a trade union background, and who has made a great show of taking on the left of his party, could turn out to be the most union-friendly Labour prime minister in history.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds tells us that people who work from home are more productive. Where is the evidence? And why, if this is so, did we learn this week that Amazon, one of the world’s most successful companies, has ordered all its staff back to the office five days a week?
Labour has promised employees flexible working, the right to switch off and so on, but employers are offered nothing but pain. Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears to have stepped back from her original plan to force employers to pay higher national insurance contributions. Yet it looks as if they will be hit with the obligation to respect more stringent employees’ rights, possibly from the first day of their employment. As employers have warned, such a system would undermine the concept of probationary periods and act as a huge disincentive to create new jobs. If an inadequate employee cannot be fired easily, they are less likely to be hired in the first place.
Labour has already begun to offend some of its new-found supporters from the world of business. Three months ago, Richard Walker, executive chairman of supermarket chain Iceland, was chosen to launch the party’s manifesto after switching support from the Conservatives. Yet a fortnight ago he warned the government he helped to elect that it could drive his business to bankruptcy if it proceeded too quickly with workplace reforms or jacked up the national minimum wage too sharply.
His turn reveals that Labour’s support from the business sector is flaky at best. Business leaders switched allegiances before the election because they hoped that by supporting Labour they could mitigate against the worst of the new government’s plans. It is far from clear that they will be successful.
From an employee’s point of view, the government is damaging the incentive for hard work by threatening higher taxes on savings and investments. We have yet to hear Reeves’s first Budget, but it is expected to contain some constriction on pensions, perhaps limiting tax relief or doing away with the right to take a tax-free lump sum upon retirement. A government with a genuine desire to promote economic growth would not be acting in this way. But then again, very few of Starmer’s front bench have ever run a company or created jobs first-hand. Britain’s relatively flexible labour laws have created comparatively low unemployment in recent years. Why damage that now by emulating France, a country with high levels of job security but where it is far harder to find stable employment in the first place?
Labour’s plan to clamp down on zero-hours contracts fundamentally misunderstands the role that this form of employment plays in the economy. Not only do such contracts allow businesses to expand and contract their workforces in tune with economic conditions, they also allow opportunities for staff who want to choose their hours. That is genuinely flexible working, by mutual agreement of employee and employer – yet it is an arrangement the government wants to all but ban.
Labour, as its name suggests, has always been the party of organised labour. But on current showing, this is turning into an administration which lacks the pragmatism of previous Labour governments. If growth really is the objective, Labour needs to change tack quickly.
Do you have a ‘story’?
As someone who worked full time in the office for 24 years and has now worked full time from home for nearly 21 – always, in both periods, on the staff – I can see both sides of the argument. But I do think the sequence matters. I would have had no idea how to work for my employers if I had begun at home. Indeed, the entire concept of a newspaper then – and even, to a large extent, now – depends on its collective capacity to find, write and edit news fast. Much of that stimulus comes from being in the same building. On Monday, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, wrote a longish letter to all employees about work methods. He praised his company’s ‘culture’, but asked whether it is best set up to ‘invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other’. He thinks it isn’t, partly because people are not in the office enough. Amazon will now revert to pre-Covid arrangements, he announced, barring ‘extenuating circumstances’. They will be there five days a week. Amazon will also reinstate ‘assigned desk arrangements’ rather than hot desking. Interesting that this most modern of big businesses feels this way. Also interesting that one of the least modern of our major institutions, the British civil service, abetted by the new government, does not. Rachel Reeves could save billions if Whitehall now wrote to its hundreds of thousands of WFH employees to say that unless they return to the office by Christmas, it’s goodbye.
A friend recently visited Hughenden, Disraeli’s house, now owned by the National Trust (NT). The first thing he saw were two introductory NT placards opposite the front door. One, headlined ‘Crafting a personal myth: Benjamin Disraeli’, tells almost nothing about his political career, except that he was ‘a UK prime minister’ (no dates, no century given). It explains that he was born Jewish but was later baptised. Both placards concentrate on his ‘mythmaking’ which, they say, allowed the Tories to ‘present him as a member of the establishment and a serious political thinker rather than an opportunistic dandy’. ‘Like Disraeli,’ burbles the second placard, ‘we curate our own stories in social media platforms.’ Gosh, I did not know that Dizzy tweeted. ‘Let’s reflect on Disraeli’s legacy,’ adds the notice. ‘Are we all authors of our own myths?’ The Disraeli image is indeed interesting, but shouldn’t NT members first be told basic facts about him, for example that this ‘opportunistic dandy’ invented ‘One Nation’ and increased the franchise by 88 per cent?
Cultural bodies like the National Trust love to deploy that word ‘stories’. We all have ‘stories’, they say. Why this word? I think because it provides an excuse for inaccuracy – rather like the phrase ‘my truth’ – and because it allows a story’s ‘curators’ to riff on the historical figures with whose legacy they are charged, rather than studying them seriously.
The late Auberon Waugh wasn’t madly keen on Yorkshiremen. He once wrote, I think in these pages, that Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, should be referred to only as ‘the Yorkshire’, since that would be enough to identify him. A disgraceful thought, of course, which would nowadays provoke cancellation. I would not dream of suggesting any such thing about Welshmen. But we are invited by a consultant psychiatrist, in a report for Westminster magistrates’ court, to consider that Huw Edwards suffered ‘cognitive dissonance’ because of ‘the particular cultural milieu of South Wales [his childhood home]’ and low self-esteem caused by ‘not getting into Oxford and going to Cardiff instead’. It is, I imagine (I never dared attempt it), very sad not to get into Oxford, and possibly, though again I do not know, unpleasant to go to Cardiff instead. But 99.9999999 per cent of the human race has to put up with not being at Oxford. The experience need not lead even Welshmen to procure child pornography, nor deserve only a suspended sentence if they do.
Very rarely indeed do letters written to newspapers by a clutch of public figures achieve much, but I am assured of a recent counter-example. In the Times of 3 July, 48 such, Catholics and non-Catholics, signed a letter begging the Pope not to banish the Latin [Tridentine] Mass from almost every Catholic church. ‘The traditional liturgy is a “cathedral” of text and gesture,’ we wrote, ‘developing as those venerable buildings did over many centuries.’ Signatories included Ian Bostridge, Nina Campbell, Lady Antonia Fraser, Dame Jane Glover, Michael Gove, Tom Holland, Tristram Hunt, Lord Lloyd-Webber, Dame Felicity Lott, Sir James MacMillan, our own dear Fraser Nelson, Sir Andras Schiff, Rory Stewart and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. The letter sought to ward off a ban which Francis was expected to promulgate that month. He did not promulgate it. Rome has gone quiet. The British media almost ignored the story, but it was big worldwide. On Monday night, many of us gathered in Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, for a High Mass of the Holy Cross ‘offered for the good estate of [us] petitioners’. We might have added to the liturgy the words Deus EST, which is the nearest Latin to ‘There IS a God’, but I suppose those present knew that already.
A footnote to Sir Keir Starmer’s removal of Lady Thatcher’s portrait from the Downing Street study named after her. I realised I did not know what picture she contemplated when the study was hers. Thanks to Wendy Baron, the outstanding retired head of the Government Art Collection, I learn that it was a touching Newlyn School painting by Frank Bramley. Called ‘Weaving a Chain of Grief’, it depicts a young woman doing just that. Beyond, through a lattice, is a view of the sea, suggesting she mourns a drowned lover. Mrs Thatcher adored the picture, but for some reason never knew its title. Perhaps Sir Keir, who says he prefers landscape to portrait, should hang it again, and enjoy its melancholy but soothing presence.
Ed Davey’s game plan
Ed Davey owes much of his election success to Boris Johnson – and in more ways than one. The slide-loving, bungee-jumping, paddleboard-slipping Lib Dem leader has, like Johnson on his zipwire, learned how to capture media attention while evading being placed on a conventional political axis. One day he’s intoning soulfully on social care in the Commons; the next rocking up to party conference on a jet ski. He wants inheritance tax hiked but decries Labour’s plans for VAT on school fees. Such shenanigans enabled him in the election to appear both serious and silly, left and right, using any publicity to deliver ruthlessly crafted messages on health, sewage and the cost-of-living crisis.
‘It would be very nice for the partyto have an economic policy,’remarked one member
The strategy paid off handsomely and 72 Lib Dem MPs were elected in July. There was a mood of euphoria at the conference in Brighton this week, as activists celebrated the party’s best result since the days of Asquith and Lloyd George. A record 61 gains will enable Davey to draw from a bigger talent pool for his upcoming reshuffle. Ex-councillors Josh Babarinde and Max Wilkinson impressed the conference on various panels. Academics such as Al Pinkerton and Mike Martin offer useful foreign expertise in parliament and the media – a role played a generation earlier by Ming Campbell. After a decade of being overstretched, frontbenchers can share the burden better in their mission to make further gains in the Blue Wall. In private, some Tories admit to admiring the quality of the intake – despite the fact that Davey’s MPs are strongly anti-Conservative (one newbie even boasts a tattoo of the Lib Dem bird on her back).
The Lib Dems are eyeing future gains in the 20 constituencies where they finished second to the Tories. Most of these adjoin existing seats, which helps campaign efforts. Conference yielded a million-pound war chest from business fees alone, and greater sums are expected next year. Hushed talk of hitting the magic figure of 100 MPs circulated among excited activists in Brighton bars.
Much could depend on who the Conservatives pick as their next leader. The conventional wisdom is that Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch would best serve Liberal fortunes. Yet with the Tories in opposition, it is Labour to which the Lib Dems must respond. Most attendees in Brighton instinctively want the Starmer government to succeed: history suggests that when Labour does well, so do the Liberals. But while many members’ values might align with Labour’s, their newly converted voters could be less keen. As one pollster puts it: ‘How does a party whose voters disproportionately earn more, send kids to private school and pay more into Treasury coffers than other voters deal with a Labour government that is against their interests?’
In their quest to both keep their Tory gains and hold Labour to account, the Lib Dem response could be summed up in three letters: NHS. All four days of this week’s conference centred on the subject of healthcare. Voters across the spectrum consistently rank it as the most important public service and ‘the Tories can’t talk about it because they broke it’, says an aide. In the past, the Lib Dems have been dismissed as a single-issue party on Iraq (2005) and Brexit (2019). Party strategists now hope the same will be true of accessing local healthcare. They sense an opening here as Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, pushes on with plans for reform. Davey has already demanded immediate NHS investment without conditions, allowing him to outflank Labour on the left – to applause from the Tory shires.
It suits the Lib Dems to focus on healthcare because both their members and the voters care a great deal about it. Yet other causes are much less popular with the wider public. During Davey’s Q&A session with journalist Carolyn Quinn, she asked who in the hall thought the UK should apply to rejoin the EU: almost everyone raised their hands. At conference fringe events, activists clashed over a group defending single-sex spaces while the floor backed abolishing jail sentences of less than 12 months. The election manifesto, drawn up by members, was notably more sympathetic to illegal migrants than the two main parties. Much of Davey’s success in the summer was his discipline in focusing his party’s efforts on issues which mattered most to voters: repeating that feat might be trickier next time around.
Moreover, while this summer marked an electoral resurgence for the Liberal Democrats, it has not been accompanied by a great revival of Liberal intellectual thought. Some 20 years ago, the party had The Orange Book and various ginger groups to explore its next steps. In Brighton there were no leading lights articulating a new vision for the party – and few MPs thinking about how to turn Liberal ideals into reality. ‘It would be very nice for the party to have an economic policy,’ remarked one member on the conference floor.
Perhaps July’s result shows how little ideas actually matter: that being a vehicle for anti-Tory sentiment is sufficient for the Lib Dems to prosper. ‘In some ways we were blessed by the mistakes of others,’ former leader Tim Farron acknowledged last week. ‘How do we go and make our own luck?’ That lack of a distinct identity could inhibit Davey’s efforts to project his party as an effective opposition to the Labour government, and make the Lib Dems the master of their own fate. In urban areas, too, there is concern about the lack of work to fight off advances from the Greens.
For now, though, most Lib Dems are simply happy to enjoy their victory lap. Few have any idea yet what the next election will look like, though Farron’s post-election report will inform the strategy when it is published in the spring. In the interim, delivery is key. The new intake has been given the instruction: ‘Go back to your constituencies – and prepare for casework.’ Repeating the Lib Dems’ most vote-efficient campaign of the past 50 years will be a challenge, but it’s one that Davey’s team will relish. ‘Winning feels good,’ remarked one newly elected MP as he headed off into the Brighton night. ‘We should do it more often!’
Hear more from James Heale on Coffee House Shots:
Nigel’s next target: Reform has Labour in its sights
At this weekend’s Reform conference in Birmingham, the opening speech will be given by a man who wasn’t even a member of the party until four months ago. James McMurdock stood in what was once a Tory safe seat. Against the odds and after three recounts, he won, and is now Reform’s accidental member of parliament.
The day after the general election, Reform leader Nigel Farage held his celebratory press conference alongside fellow seat-winners Lee Anderson, Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe, announcing their new gang of four. Half an hour later, from a Westminster pub, they learned that they would be five – after McMurdock, a supposed ‘paper candidate’, was declared the MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock. ‘It was the first time I’d heard James’s name,’ admits one party insider. ‘The only reason I’d hear about a candidate is because they were in trouble, so therefore this was someone that wasn’t a bad news story.’
McMurdock’s rise says a lot about where Reform’s success has come from – and where the party is going. He is a 38-year-old Essex banker who signed up to the party on a whim after concluding he liked what it was saying on tax and the £25 membership fee was worth it to ‘teach the [main] parties a bit of a lesson’. A few weeks later, Rishi Sunak called the snap election and Reform emailed possible candidates, asking for another £25 to be vetted. McMurdock complied.
James McMurdock overturned a 20,000 majority with no serious funding or publicity
He was interviewed over Zoom, he says, by ‘a Scottish chap’ who was in a car and pressed him on his stance on green issues. ‘I told him that listening to the Reform energy policy is like listening to your granddad give advice. Not especially exciting, but probably good advice,’ he says. ‘Listening to Labour was more like listening to your pal who has just finished his first term at university and is deeply excited by everything that he’s just heard.’ McMurdock passed the Reform test.
Paternity leave meant he had paid time off to campaign – ‘My wife was happy to have me out the house’ – so he set off trying to win the seat in which he grew up. His was an insurgent campaign with no support from the centre: ‘My patter started with, “Hello mate, can I ask you a question?’’.’ He didn’t know to list a sponsor on his leaflets – a legal requirement for campaign literature – so had to get a special stamp made with Reform on and then manually stamp 20,000 leaflets at home with his wife, who’d recently given birth. ‘What a bloody bugger that was,’ he recalls. ‘I had to set up a bit of a conveyor-belt system on my dining table.’
McMurdock ran his comms largely on TikTok, amassing 10,000 followers. His biggest donor was a lady called Barbara – whom he’s never met – who gave £50. His second largest donation was £25. In total, he raised £95. On election night, he turned up at the count with his parents. ‘My dad was like, “I don’t have to count, do I?”. No, you don’t have to count. My wife is there with the buggy, my mum, my dad, my sisters, my mother-in-law, it was just the family going, what’s going on here then? Then Labour turn up with their clipboards and iPads and the Conservatives the same.’
McMurdock overturned a 20,000 majority with no serious fundraising or publicity. But the energy he drew on was exasperation with all of the main parties. This was the case for most Reform candidates, who between them won some 4.1 million votes. According to those on the campaign, 95 per cent of Reform candidates were given no help from the party machine and were not expected to win. After his election, it came out that 20 years ago, McMurdock spent a week in a young offenders’ institution for assaulting a former girlfriend. He describes the incident as the biggest regret of his life.
All of this raises a question: if McMurdock could fight his way into parliament with no help, what could happen in a future election if Reform has carefully selected candidates and party support? Answering this is what the party is now focused on. For Reform’s leadership, the last election was largely about hurting what they felt was a treacherous and useless Tory party. Now, Farage’s party has Labour in its sights.
As Reform prepares for its first conference as a serious political force, it is aiming for more Labour upsets between now and the next general election, which is expected in 2029. When Farage theatrically announced his return to the fold a few weeks into the campaign, he did warn that his party would soon be as much of a problem for Labour as the Tories. At the time, however, that did not worry Labour’s Southwark HQ. Instead, aides huddled around the screen and fist-bumped. As one Labour figure put it then: ‘They might take some of our voters but they will hurt the Tories a lot more.’
‘At that stage of our development they were right,’ Farage says now. ‘Just like Ukip. We rose on Conservative voters, but in the end reached the big numbers on Labour votes.’
When this year’s election campaign began, 40 per cent of the country did not know what Reform was – so Farage sees his 4.1 million votes as a fraction of what might come with more awareness. With Labour already polling below 30 per cent, and Keir Starmer’s personal poll ratings plummeting, the opportunity is clear.
A poll by J.L. Partners suggests that one in four Labour voters is considering backing Reform. ‘If they came to us, that’s half the number needed to win the next election,’ says Farage. Reform’s new chairman, Zia Yusuf, has been tasked with professionalising the party so it can take advantage of these opportunities.
What of Farage’s target seats? Reform finished second in 98 constituencies, of which 89 are now held by Labour. Farage is looking to make gains in Wales and Scotland and to be the main challenger to Labour in the Red Wall seats of the Midlands and northern England. ‘That’s where we’ll be fighting Labour and of course we’re going to measure our success next year in the county elections.’
Starmer and his party are eager not to give Reform the publicity it craves. Labour would prefer to keep bashing the Tories rather than raise awareness of what Farage offers. ‘What people need to understand is Labour are in government. That changes everything,’ says a Reform figure of its approach to opposition.
Ministers insist there is a ceiling on the Reform vote, but they are in no doubt that the threat is real. ‘When Keir says he wants closer ties with Europe but then runs scared of a youth mobility scheme, you just know that is fear of Farage,’ says a Labour insider. Reform’s strategy will be to paint Labour as an out-of-touch metropolitan party of the liberal elite and soak up its working-class vote. Starmer’s proposed outdoor smoking ban is further grist to their mill.
The first-ever meeting of Starmer’s political cabinet (that is, without the civil servants) focused on understanding the problem posed by Reform. Ministers were told that, in effect, Labour won by winning over anti-EU Tory voters appalled by the inability of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to turn Brexit into a meaningful agenda. These are all prime Reform voters too.
Some of Labour’s rising stars – the newly elected Josh Simons in Makerfield, for instance – are all too aware that Reform is breathing down their necks. It’s one of the reasons Starmer has this week been willing to ignore howls from the left and praise Giorgia Meloni for her efforts in reducing illegal immigration in Italy. It’s meant to show voters that he’s as serious as she is about tackling the issue.
Labour would prefer to keep bashing the Tories rather than raise awareness of what Farage offers
However, Farage intends to attack Labour on more than just immigration. One obvious point for him will be opposing Starmer’s austerity. To the bafflement of economists, Reform promised to slash tax and splash the cash on the NHS. But a smaller party doesn’t need to worry too much about making fiscal sense. Reform MPs say that the winter fuel allowance furore is already moving voters towards Farage. If Rachel Reeves’s Budget next month is as ‘painful’ as Starmer has warned, more could follow.
Then there’s net zero. Reform figures are keeping a close eye on news of jobs lost or threatened by the so-called green transition. Last week it was announced that Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery, in Grangemouth, is to close. That will lead to 400 job losses. There’s also the recent court decision to axe plans for a Cumbrian coal mine and the closure of two blast furnaces at Port Talbot steelworks, which could all mean 2,500 layoffs.
To Starmer’s left, the unions recognise the risk. Unite’s Sharon Graham is among those warning Labour that ‘the road to net zero cannot be paid for with workers’ jobs’. The GMB’s Gary Smith mocks the optimistic idea of ‘green jobs’, saying they consist of London lobbyists and people counting the dead birds killed by wind turbines.
The trade union rebellion against net zero, from a pro-industrial Labour tradition, is hard to reconcile with Ed Miliband’s promised green revolution. It could make lots of votes for Reform in Scotland, Wales and the Red Wall.
Inevitably, immigration remains Reform’s cause célèbre. The small boat arrivals have not abated since Starmer took office. Labour has made a considerable fuss over its creation of a new command border force, with an experienced police chief announced this week as its head. But it’s unclear what extra powers, if any, the new agency could use. ‘It is the thing that could really blow us up,’ says a Labour aide of the failure to stop the boats. Farage and his party will push any shortcomings on the issue as evidence that Starmer is not on the side of the Leave-voting masses.
Farage’s success this time was down to widespread disappointment with the Tory government. Next time, he hopes, his party will win more votes thanks to an even greater sense of disgruntlement with Labour.
For now, parliament appears to limit Reform’s ambitions – it is hard to make a mark in the House of Commons with only five MPs. Yet campaigning opportunities outside remain strong. The party is already working on candidate selection, to avoid the self-forced errors of the last campaign. The next stop is to win new bases through the locals that will help it build support.
Could that momentum eventually propel Farage into No. 10? The idea sounds far-fetched. When I ask McMurdock what he thinks, however, he replies: ‘I think the chances of Nigel becoming prime minister are better than the chances were of me becoming an MP.’
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Who should win the Stirling Prize?
The Stirling Prize is the Baftas for architects, a moment for auto-erotic self-congratulation. Awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects, its premise is straightforward: it’s for Britain’s best building of the year. But this year, it seems the prize committee has struggled even with this. Among the six projects shortlisted for this ostensibly nationwide prize, four are in London and a couple could barely even be considered buildings at all.
The most tenuous nominee for a ‘best building’ – yet one with the best bookies’ odds – is the Elizabeth Line by Grimshaw Architects. One of the most expensive infrastructure projects in Europe with a much-delayed opening, it remains frustratingly unreliable. While this can’t be blamed on the architects, the station interiors can – and should – be.
The architecture of metro systems has a rich history, from Moscow’s ‘people’s palace’ luxury to Montreal’s subway and the Jubilee Line extension, where every station was a test bed for creative experimentation. Yet Grimshaw Architects have opted for a pallid utilitarianism that seems to say: ‘You should be grateful for any infrastructure at all, let alone get any delight from it.’
The Elizabeth Line’s nomination is like a fig leaf for Britain’s inability to build impressive infrastructure
Chucking out centuries of Underground-design wisdom, the architects have dispensed with any visual cues to help travellers identify stations. There’s nothing here that resembles the Piccadilly Line’s charming tiled patterns for the illiterate, Paolozzi’s mosaics or heraldic dragons at Bank. Instead, we have anonymous ‘consistency’. The central London platforms all look identical, meaning if you don’t read English, have dyslexia, or if you find someone blocking your view of the signs, you have to double check you’re at the right station. Despite its exorbitant cost, there are compromises everywhere: signage dwarfed by the cavernous spaces and stingy platform displays with which to find out if a train will ever make it past Paddington.
The tunnels are clad in porous concrete panels – what the architects ironically call ‘long-life architectural elements’ – and where they meet benches, there are the ghostly stains of the backs of the thousands of passengers past who have leant back on them. Transport for London is mulling awkward fixes, such as patching over them with lurid vinyl stickers. This alone should have disqualified it from the shortlist. Its nomination feels like a face-saving fig leaf for Britain’s chronic inability to build impressive infrastructure. I’m reminded of Sir Humphrey’s words: ‘We gave the architect a knighthood so that nobody would ever say that.’
The other non-building in the shortlist is the entire King’s Cross masterplan, which is in fact a collection of 70 new and restored buildings spanning 67 acres designed by 30 different architects. While no one can doubt how thorough its deep cleanse of this grotty industrial backwater and red-light district has been, forcing judges to compare the architectural quality of an entire postcode to a single building is perverse.
And that quality is a mixed bag: it’s mostly forgettable blocks containing new flats and offices, counterbalanced with its public spaces that are, thankfully, pleasingly generous and well used. There’s the odd blockbuster too: Stanton Williams’s thoughtful conversion of the Victorian Granary Building into the home of Central Saint Martins. At its centre is Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels Group’s overbearing, almost finished behemoth for Google HQ, which marks the area’s transformation into a sanitised playground for Silicon Valley techno-yuppies.
At the opposite end of the scale is Chowdhury Walk, a mews of 11 council houses developed by Hackney Council. The architects Jessam Al-Jawad and Dean Pike are both veterans of David Chipperfield’s office, British architecture’s arch-minimalist – and it shows. Despite the public-sector budget, the two- and three-bedroom terraces are crisply detailed, arranged in an efficient sawtooth pattern on the squeezed site. Its touches are deceptively simple, such as the elegant joinery of the front door camouflaging the bin store and the patterns of the cobbling demarcating the private doorstep and public walkway. The brick houses rest on a robust-feeling granite base, which, as the architect reveals, disguises a cost-saving of using fewer bricks. No expense was spared, however, for its environmental bona fides: windows are triple-glazed and its internal structure is cross-laminated timber.
The end result is solidly crafted homes that trump many flimsy new-builds. Indeed, Hackney has sold four of the houses privately to help recoup costs, snapped up for around £750,000 and more. The private and socially rented homes are indistinguishable, inside and out, so council tenants must be incredibly pleased at winning the jackpot with this bit of municipal luxury. For Hackney’s legions of ineligible forever-renters, probably not so much.
This pales in comparison to the municipal empire-building of yesteryear. Park Hill Estate in Sheffield, the largest listed building in Europe, was built by the city council’s slum-clearance programme in the late 1950s, which razed an entire hillside of terraces and replaced them with a continuous wall-like megastructure of almost 1,000 flats up to 13 storeys high. Here, for the first time, were ‘streets in the sky’ – much-copied in later estates. This concept saw flats accessed from open-air decks on every third floor connecting the entire structure, emulating a street’s social life as neighbours were rehoused next to each other. Yet it was fanciful social engineering. Historian Nikolaus Pevsner quickly predicted it will ‘be a slum in half a century or less’. And he was right: by the 1970s, Park Hill and its elevated streets became a byword for deprivation, crime, and anti-social behaviour. (The ‘streets in the sky’ were finally fixed but not architecturally. Instead trouble-makers were simply priced out. Now Park Hill is gated and mostly privately owned.) It became Grade II* listed in 1998 following a campaign in which niche interest in its questionable innovations triumphed over the average Sheffielder preferring to ‘just knock it down’, encumbering the city with a protected carcass. The developer Urban Splash has since taken it over and tasked architects with rehabilitating it. But while the (also Stirling-shortlisted) first phase demanded a total reputational reset, hollowing out the concrete frame into something hardly recognisable, the second phase by Mikhail Riches Architects, shortlisted this year, followed a gentler, more unobtrusive approach. They scrubbed back the original multi-tone infill brickwork to its former glory, focused on making the flats fit for modern living and today’s energy standards, while preserving its raw appeal for brutalist fetishists. With half the shortlist made up of adaptations of existing buildings, the award showcases retrofitting, in keeping with its environmental agenda. Another nominee – that I’ve written about before in these pages – is the National Portrait Gallery renovation by Jamie Fobert and Purcell. They have stripped out decades of unsympathetic clutter and boldly relocated the entrance to the north in order to face a new public square: it’s a lesson in conservation with conviction. Once you overlook Tracey Emin’s unsightly signature scrawls in the new bronze doors the moves feel right, like it was always meant to be this way. I took issue with the curators’ revisionism of the country’s history, but a bit of historical revisionism in the building was more than welcome.
Finally, the undoubted underdog of the race is Wraxall Yard. While it doesn’t make lofty claims of national importance, it proves what can be achieved when client, architect and consultants, are working in lockstep. Nick Read, a farmer, was shaped by his mother’s experience of using a wheelchair after she developed multiple sclerosis and the struggle that entailed at home and on holiday. As a result, he decided to convert a romantically dilapidated dairy farm near Dorchester into accessible holiday cottages.
The design affords a sense of effortlessness to the inhabitants that able-bodied people take for granted
When the architect Clementine Blakemore was appointed, it also happened to be her first major project. Read’s trust in her was well-founded: throughout the building one can feel the fruits of Blakemore’s research, where she spent months honing the brief with Read, engaging with the Centre for Accessible Environments and speaking to countless people with disabilities to work out not just what would tick the boxes, but meaningfully restore a sense of independence for disabled users.
This included everything from ceiling hoists integrated into the roof trusses, grab-rails built into sinks, raisable kitchen worktops and beds to scuff-resistant materials at wheelchair height. Even outside the buildings, the landscaping was meticulously planned to ensure level access using the natural slope of the site, without ramps and other clumsy afterthoughts. This was all exquisitely integrated into the design, avoiding any institutional plastickiness and affording a sense of effortlessness to the inhabitants that able-bodied people take for granted.
The architecture is far from showy. Instead, Blakemore stepped back, teasing out the existing soul of the place. Teaming up with the structural engineer to retain as many of the original timber trusses as possible, she devised an assortment of repairs that preserved the farm’s layers of history. The barn’s windows, added ad hoc over the centuries, were kept and incorporated into layouts, creating a gratifying pattern of unexpected openings that affords even infants a view. Wraxall is not just competent architecture but a beautiful place.
Architecture awards often attract big projects and even bigger egos, and the Stirling Prize is one of the most substantial gongs going. Yet with Wraxall Yard on the shortlist, judges have all the ingredients to show what good architecture is really about. So why don’t they change the habit of a lifetime?
My night with the worst kind of nostalgia
American Football are a band whose legend was formed by the internet: some Illinois college kids who made an album for a little label in 1999, went their separate ways, and in their absence found that a huge number of people had responded to their music. They duly reunited in 2014. They are often identified as emo, the most confounding of all genre names, given it means everything and nothing, but American Football are not of the eyeliner and dyed-hair variety exemplified by My Chemical Romance, nor the angsty pop-punk variant of Weezer or Jimmy Eat World, nor the shouty hardcore punk evolution of the genre’s founders in the 1980s.
There was nothing remotely punky about American Football, who are now middle-aged men, recreating their feelings as teenagers for the benefit of thirtysomethings reliving their own adolescence. (It was one of the most homogenous crowds I’ve ever seen: almost entirely aged between 30 and 40. Every millennial moper in London seemed to be there.) Their music is intricate – all spidery guitar lines and unusual drum patterns and bass that throbs rather than propels. This is why they also get lumped in with another genre, known as math rock, due to its entirely unfunky devotion to sterile precision (American Football certainly owe a debt to the Kentucky band Slint’s album Spiderland).
They were awfully good, making their intricacy seem as natural as shelling peas. And I hated every single moment. That’s very unfair of me, since large chunks of what I hated was the solipsism – which, presumably, they have grown out of since leaving college – and solipsism is pretty much the point of teenage lyric writing. Except it only works when your audience is in the same place as you in life, and I did not hear American Football as a kid. At 55, a song called ‘I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional’ just makes me want to roll my eyes. (To be fair, the band themselves have noted the strangeness of trying to sing, as adults, songs written by overwrought kids.)
Instead of revisiting any old feelings in the Roundhouse, I sat wanting to scream warnings from history at the rest of the audience: ‘Wake up, sheeple! This is how we end up with Miranda July films! Stop, for the sake of humanity!’
It didn’t help that this music represents one of my least beloved types of indie: that peculiarly American variety that emerged in the late 1990s (see also Modest Mouse or the Postal Service) of emotional oversharing set to music that was melodic without ever presenting a tune. The signifiers of tunes are there – chord changes, arpeggios, that stuff – but it’s all mood, never quite pulling into focus. You get tons of musicians rhapsodising about the life-changing effects of the first American Football album (Matty Healy of the 1975 is a big fan and has had them open for his band). But no one should trust the taste of musicians, as everyone who went out and bought records in the 1980s because Michael Stipe or Morrissey recommended them will know.
Much more fun was Friday night’s pairing of British psychedelia – Gruff Rhys, from Wales and Jane Weaver, from the north-west. These days, Rhys is one of British music’s beloved slight eccentrics – his band all took to the stage wearing GR Logistics overalls and Rhys announced they were available for deliveries. The music wasn’t hard to comprehend, often leaning into country rock, and the tunes here were not drowned out by fiddling around. But Rhys’s mumbly baritone sometimes disappeared into the eaves, when one wanted to hear what he was singing.
Jane Weaver, who opened, was flatly brilliant. It remains baffling why, 20 years into her career, she isn’t headlining these shows. Her voice comes from the English folk tradition – vibratoless and high and pure – but she pairs with it unexpected music. At times it was very Hawkwind, all implacable drone and thudding momentum. And then, on ‘The Revolution of Super Visions’, it became a sort of hyper-coloured bouncy funk, like Talking Heads but less earnest. ‘Love in Constant Spectacle’ was an anaesthetised, woozy near-power ballad.
If she had an American accent and told everyone she was queer, I suspect Weaver would be playing the Royal Albert Hall. But she’s from Widnes and has two kids and maybe she doesn’t catch the imagination like St Vincent does, which is wildly unfair because she’s every bit the British answer to St Vincent in both musical curiosity and singularity of vision. She makes everything sound different, but unmistakably hers.
Not for the squeamish: The Substance reviewed
Both horribly familiar and wonderfully shocking, this body-horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat does a very traditional thing – turning the scramble for youth and beauty into a monster of immeasurable disgust and immorality – in a huge way. There is nothing minimal or restrained or overly clever here; nothing of the nuance in language or wit that makes its forerunner, The Picture of Dorian Gray, so haunting. This is a presentation of the horror of ageing for the bombastic mash-up age, melding vampire, sci-fi, feminist tragicomedy and dystopian genres. It’s like a reverse Barbie but with lashings of Poor Things, Blonde, the uncomfortably up-close Marilyn Monroe biopic, and plenty more.
We are made lecherous voyeurs of these idealised female body parts, and end up ogling them
The story begins with Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who has lost hers in a big way. She is a middle-aged morning TV aerobics star who was once the toast of Hollywood and she’s been sacked, in the crudest terms, on her 50th birthday for being too old. Strolling out of work in a daze, she is in a car accident. One of the (gorgeous) doctors who treats her slips her a USB drive entitled ‘The Substance’ and a note: ‘It changed my life.’ Desperate and depressed, Sparkle orders the product promoted on the drive. The next thing we know, she is injecting herself with a mysterious serum, triggering a process of duplication. As she lies lifeless on the floor, her younger, idealised self scrambles out of her spine. The two versions get a week-on, week-off schedule, which creates the core tension: the young, increasingly successful one, a starlet who calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), doesn’t want to switch back every seven days and begins literally sucking all the life out of Sparkle to go on in the youthful body for longer. By now she has chucked Sparkle’s body into a cupboard, where she becomes older and older with each ever-less-frequent re-activation.
The tension between the women builds to a bloody battle. Even through the experience of watching the blood and guts squelch and spew across the screen with mounting venom and velocity, there is an obvious playfulness which makes a nice counterbalance to the gore, in the best horror tradition.
There are some surprisingly tired tropes here, with a pre-MeToo Hollywood depicted through all-male management, casting – and, of course, open lechery. And while the drama of The Substance is based around a futuristic serum, it portrays a curiously dated landscape: Sparkle’s flat is an empty nest of 1980s carpeting and garish chandeliers, and the internet doesn’t exist. There are other feasibility issues which confuse the plot further, but the most obvious is that it hinges on two supposed opposites – Sparkle (old, plain and irrelevant) and Sue (young, perfect and an Insta-success). But they are not opposites. Anyone that looks like Moore is doing pretty well at appearing youthful and beautiful.
Then there is Sparkle’s ambition, which is to be her own replacement on the morning fitness show. This leaves the emphasis on the broader, fuzzier motive: her desire to return to a tight, toned body and thus to regain the value and worth that age has stripped from her in a sexist Hollywood. And it is here, in the substantial screen time devoted to Sue’s perfect body, all flexing abs and thrusting breasts, that the presumed feminist intent of The Substance falls down. We are made lecherous voyeurs of these idealised female body parts and end up ogling them, wanting them, and thus understanding what Sparkle wanted to regain – even as her impulse, and the world that created it, is brutally sent up.
Still, there is great satisfaction in seeing a vivid schlockiness amplified to evoke the real-life horror and weirdness of having a body that eats, drinks, expels and ages in general, as well as the pressures facing women as they journey through time. Overall, it’s a treat – but it’s not for the squeamish.
More Airplane! than Speed: Nightsleeper reviewed
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to Beijing. Displaying a heroic indifference to plausibility, the show was an increasingly deranged mash-up of every thriller convention known to man – while still posing (when it remembered to) as a thoughtful exploration of realpolitik.
By the end, it was all so daft that the biggest influence no longer seemed to be Speed, but Airplane!
Funnily enough, this week’s Nightsleeper was much the same thing – only this time on an overnight train from Glasgow to London. The first sign that the passengers wouldn’t get a restful sleep before Euston came when a mysterious beeping device with lots of wires was discovered in the guardroom floor. Luckily, the man who discovered it was Joe Roag (Joe Cole), a Met detective who happened to know the switchboard number of the National Security Cyber Centre. He was then put straight through to the acting technical director Abby Aysgarth (Alexandra Roach) who, naturally, was at the airport about to go on a much-needed holiday. Even so, she immediately returned to the office to stare up at a giant computer screen covered with flashing symbols.
From this, and the information supplied by Joe, Abby deduced that the train had been ‘hackjacked’ and was now under the control of that bleeping device. Having helpfully stopped at Motherwell to release most of the passengers and crew (thereby reducing the on-board cast to a more manageable 12), the now driverless sleeper set off again with the apparent aim of crashing into London.
Meanwhile, we’d met Abby’s colleagues, who duly included an awkwardly recent ex-lover, a computer nerd who looked about 14 and a stern female boss whose catchphrase was ‘Abby! Incident room! Now!’. By this stage all that was missing was the mad scientist who’d long predicted the disaster – and he soon showed up in the scenery-chewing form of a spectacularly bearded David Threlfall.
As in Red Eye, the programme’s shamelessness presented the viewer with a choice. Either you could adopt a haughty sneer at the improbability of it all or you could turn off your mind, relax and admit that the thrills were piling up nicely. The trouble was that, as in Red Eye too, the second and more appealing of these options – undeniable fun to begin with – became ever harder to sustain.
For the first three episodes or so, you could certainly argue that Nightsleeper did an exciting job of showing us Abby and her team desperately improvising a series of unavailing solutions for Joe to try. The longer this went on, though, the more it felt as if the programme itself was desperately improvising as well: randomly throwing in one instantly resolved cliffhanger after another, while Abby’s facial expression changed from aghast to relieved and back again.
By the end, the whole thing had become not just repetitive but so daft that the biggest influence at work no longer seemed to be 24, Speed or a James Bond film – but Airplane!.
It’s been a good few years since I watched Strictly Come Dancing, back when the children were younger and it was a much-loved feature of our family Saturday nights. So it was with a sense of both nostalgia and reassurance that I returned this week to find that nothing has really changed.
Needless to say, there’s no Brucie – and if anything, the series may be even more camp. Yet, despite the gleefully publicised recent troubles about alleged bullying (unmentioned this weekend), the launch show was much as I remember previous launch shows being – which is to say a bit odd. The chief purpose of them is to match up each of the celebrities with their professional dancer: a process that everybody concerned does their best to invest with enormous jeopardy. Except, of course, that it doesn’t actually matter. Every celeb knows they’ll get a good-looking, talented and wildly effusive partner who’ll profess deep joy at the idea of working together and promise them that they’re in for loads of fun.
Then again, even if they did feel any disappointment, we’d never be allowed to glimpse it. All the female celebs (presumably under instruction) greet the appearance of their collaborator with loud screams; all the male ones (ditto) with a more manly chuckle of delight.
And from there, all they have to do is use the phrase ‘out of my comfort zone’ a few times and answer some fairly easy questions such as ‘How excited are you?’ from hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman (who, incidentally, make live television look a lot easier than it is).
As for this year’s crop of celebs, they’re also much as I remember: a promising, personable mix of grizzled former sportsmen, game old female troupers, self-deprecating fat blokes and, most pleasing of all, reality-show ‘stars’ that parents can take a weird combination of middle-aged pride and indignation in not having heard of.
Inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh
Laura Gascoigne has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert Aurier described his six paintings in the 1890 Brussels exhibition of Les XX as the product of a ‘terrible and distraught genius’, the artist responded that, far from being a genius, he was ‘very secondary’ and that his sunflowers – now in the National Gallery – were no different ‘from so many pictures of flowers more skilfully painted’. If he were alive today he would probably have protested at the National Gallery making an exhibition of his work the high point of its bicentenary programme, but he would have liked its focus on his inspirations rather than his distress.
This is not the Vincent and Paul show: its preoccupations, and style, are entirely Vincent’s
The show, which covers the artist’s period in Provence from February 1888 to May 1890, takes its subtitle, Poets and Lovers, from a pair of portraits painted in Arles in 1888. ‘The Poet’ was the dreamy Eugène Boch, a young Belgian painter with a ‘Dante-like’ head; ‘The Lover’ was the handsome Zouave lieutenant Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose success with women Van Gogh envied while consoling himself that ‘he has all the Arlésiennes he wants’ but ‘can’t paint them’. In the opening room the two portraits flank ‘The Poet’s Garden’ (1888) showing a couple walking hand in hand in the public park opposite the Yellow House he planned as a base for his projected ‘studio of the south’. Van Gogh admitted that the park was ‘nothing special’, but after reading about Boccaccio and Petrarch – who met his muse Laura in nearby Avignon – he imagined it haunted by the spirits of Italian early Renaissance poets and embarked on a series of paintings of lovers strolling in its gardens, intending them as decorations for the guest room he had earmarked for Gauguin.
Van Gogh’s early views of Arles thrum with expectancy. In the famous painting of ‘The Yellow House’ (1888) the streets are illuminated like an opera set, with members of the chorus milling around waiting for the entrance of the principal singers. The long-awaited principal, Gauguin, would arrive in October, but he is strangely absent from this exhibition. The only paintings dating from his fateful two-month stay are ‘Van Gogh’s Chair’, ‘The Sower’ and an uncharacteristically broad-brush view of ‘The Alyscamps’ cemetery (all 1888), painted in his company. Everything else was painted in anticipation of his arrival or in recovery from the aftermath of his visit. This is not the Vincent and Paul show: its preoccupations, and style, are entirely Vincent’s. Van Gogh was drawn to the south not by Gauguin but by the now half-forgotten Provençal painter Adolphe Monticelli, whose fiery palette and juicy impasto embodied ‘the rich colour and rich sun of the glorious south’ to his northern eye. It was the example of Monticelli, who ‘did the south all in yellow, all in orange, all in sulphur’ that emboldened him to paint the yellow on yellow still life of sunflowers which astonished Gauguin. ‘Merde! Merde!’ he remembered its impact years later. ‘Everything is yellow! I don’t know what painting is any longer!’
Van Gogh associated sunflowers with gratitude, but not all the paintings in this show have poetic messages. Urged to work from imagination by Gauguin, he was happiest when grounded in reality. He beat the bounds of Arles looking for views that lent themselves to dynamic compositions à la Japonaise: with its diagonal tree trunk, ‘The Sower’ owes as much to Hiroshige as to Millet.
A series of large reed pen drawings made around the ruins of Montmajour Abbey deploy the graphic language of dots and dashes of the Japanese woodcut. A panoramic view of the plain of La Crau – ‘one of the best I’ve done with my pen’ – testifies to Van Gogh’s love of observational detail, from the piled trucks of the passing goods train in the middle distance to the pebbles and tufts of dry grass at his feet. This marvellous set of drawings required 50 sessions, battling heat, mosquitoes and the Mistral: ‘If a view makes one forget those little vexations,’ he reasoned, ‘there must be something in it.’
Treetops lick the sky like flames and clouds form ectoplasmic arabesques unknown to meteorology
For Van Gogh, working en plein air was a tonic; in the asylum at Saint-Rémy it became a form of therapy. Back in the hospital garden in April 1889 after a breakdown, he reported to his brother Theo, ‘I recovered all my clarity for work’, but hospital regulations obliged him to finish works begun outdoors in the studio. Without the reality check of an actual view, his increasingly calligraphic brushstrokes went their own way: the treetops in ‘A Wheatfield, with Cypresses’ (1889) lick the sky like flames and the clouds form themselves into ectoplasmic arabesques unknown to meteorology. In ‘The Olive Trees’ (1889), the billowing clouds, mountains, treetops and earth make you feel seasick. In the greatest of Van Gogh’s Provençal landscapes, observation and imagination are in perfect balance; when the balance of his mind is upset you can read it in the swirls of paint, like reading tea leaves.
Manacorda’s thrills and spills at Prom 72
At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA, looking miserable. So she pushed him towards the piano with the words: ‘Come on, Professor, give us a tune!’
I couldn’t help thinking of those words on Friday night, when we heard the first Proms performance of a symphony written in 1847 by a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. The Third Symphony of Louise Farrenc is full of well-crafted melodic lines, neatly configured to fit maddeningly predictable textbook chord progressions. It’s delicately orchestrated, but even the feathery flutes of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment couldn’t disguise the professor’s failure to give us a single memorable tune. This is not a popular opinion. ‘Be careful not to upset her fans,’ a distinguished musician warned me after the concert. ‘They’re almost as fierce as the Clara Schumann flash mob.’ He was right: nearly all the references to Farrenc on the internet are gushingly enthusiastic, celebrating not just her music’s technical competence, which is fair enough, but also its ‘distinctive voice’. Really? It’s true that in the scherzo of the Third Symphony you hear a distinctive voice, but unfortunately it’s Mendelssohn’s.
I found only one snippet of mildly qualified praise, from a critic suggesting that Farrenc was a gifted ‘second-tier’ composer. Which raises the question: if she belongs to the second tier, where do we place Hummel and Berwald, both of whom sometimes painted by numbers but could also produce heart-stopping melodies and modulations? And would this symphony have been showcased at the Proms if the composer’s Christian name had been Louis instead of Louise?
‘Trailblazing’ was the adjective that the BBC chose to describe the Farrenc symphony. It’s hard to think of a more inappropriate description of such resolutely rule-bound music, particularly as after the interval Antonello Manacorda conducted the OAE in the ultimate Third Symphony trailblazer, Beethoven’s Eroica.
The 54-year-old Italian is only now reaching a wider public after recording a Beethoven cycle with the Kammerakademie Potsdam, one of those virtuosic German chamber orchestras that mix modern and period instruments and can blow the roof off with their valveless horns and machine-gun timpani. Its Eroica is razor-sharp and, in the funeral march, achieves a gentle melancholy interrupted by flashes of thunder – an effect that, as the Gramophone critic noted, owed much to the glorious first oboe.
The oboe was one of the reasons Manacorda’s Proms funeral march didn’t reach the standard of Potsdam. It wasn’t the soloist’s fault. The instrument’s statement of the tune plays a big part in establishing the mood of the movement, and it must have been the conductor’s decision – perhaps out of deference to the OAE’s ‘period’ identity – to exaggerate the dotting, making the march sound disconcertingly jaunty. Matters weren’t helped when Manacorda stepped too hard on the gas for the beatific central section; it may be ‘a sudden ray of sunshine in a dark sky’, to quote George Grove, but this verged on the jubilant, as if the mourners were happy that the hero was dead. The thunder, compared to the Potsdam recording, was disappointingly muted.
But there were also thrills. The timpanist’s hard sticks ripped through the Albert Hall’s mushy acoustic. Although the natural horns slipped from time to time, as they do in live performances, they gave us a wonderful blast of the hunting field in the scherzo. The theme of the finale was rollicking and carefree, and if there was a feeling of drift half way through the movement we should blame Beethoven: after the slow variation he takes so long building up the grandeur that the explosive coda is too little, too late.
At the Barbican on Sunday, Sir Antonio Pappano demonstrated his charismatic command over the London Symphony Orchestra. The main item was another Third Symphony, by Saint-Saëns, in a performance that didn’t live up to its popular title of ‘Organ Symphony’. There was an organ, of course, played by the great Anna Lapwood, but it was a modest instrument that couldn’t compete with the LSO’s ferocious brass.
Pappano builds his sound from the bottom up; his dark textures and bursts of operatic melodrama were perfect for Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, but in the Saint-Saëns they overwhelmed not just the organ but also the loveliest thing in the score, the torrent of arpeggios from the orchestral piano.
That didn’t happen to Yuja Wang in Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto. She found the muscle to match the sweep of Pappano’s cinematic accompaniment, and in the slow movement her twists of rubato summoned the restless spirit of Scriabin. What a deeply probing musician she is, and how deplorable that so many critics feel obliged to mention her skimpy dresses and four-inch heels. So I won’t. But I loved the sunglasses.
A massive, joyous, sensational hit: Why Am I So Single? reviewed
Why Am I So Single? opens with two actors on stage impersonating the play’s writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. You may not recognise the names but you’ve probably heard of their smash-hit, Six, which re-imagined the tragic wives of Henry VIII as glamorous pop divas. This follow-up show is a spoof of vintage musicals and it’s deliberately knowing and self-referential. That’s why the authors are played by members of the cast, and they start with a few disparaging quips about Mamma Mia! and other West End fare. They even call the audience at the Garrick ‘riff-raff’, which seems a little charmless. The actors then morph into two new characters, Oliver and Nancy, who write together, like the authors, and who need inspiration for a show that’s just been commissioned by the Garrick’s managers. See? It’s very self-regarding – and perhaps a tad smug.
This show is clever, fleet-footed and endlessly funny, but the opening insult leaves a bad taste
We flash back to Oliver and Nancy’s first meeting, where they bonded over their shared love of Oliver! by Lionel Bart and laughed like mad when they discovered that they’d both been named after the show’s best-loved characters. Back in their shared bedsit, they cast around for ideas. Perhaps their failed attempts to find love online could provide the requisite material? Yes indeed. The script develops into a parody of modern dating culture with numerous references to American sitcoms and the back-catalogue of classic musicals. It may sound awful but this show is clever, fleet-footed and endlessly funny. However, the opening insult leaves a bad taste. You can’t dismiss your entire audience as ‘riff-raff’. If you throw that barb at the upper circle you can get the punters in the cheap seats to laugh at themselves and everyone else will join in.
The witty script is complemented by cartoonish costumes that poke fun at the threadbare furniture in shabby-chic apartments. One actor plays a fridge with a hinged door that opens and shuts. Another impersonates a standard lamp with a functioning lightbulb on a pull-string. These designs are good enough to be sold as merchandise.
The music is unpredictable and full of strange surprises. A song that starts as a prayer about a lost jumper develops into a parable on the theme of abandoned love. Another tune is a tap-dance number that mocks our fixation with tap-tap-tapping on our screens all the time. An obvious idea. Why didn’t someone else think of it? There’s a touch of the Beatles about Marlow and Moss. They pick up the discarded scraps of popular culture and fashion them into pleasing and unlikely new shapes.
The cast serve the material brilliantly. Jo Foster is fantastic value as Oliver, despite his habit of winking and pointing at random spectators as if he knows them personally. Leesa Tulley (Nancy) has an engaging and sardonically funny persona and a fantastic vocal range. She even throws in a few operatic flourishes to show off her skills in the upper register. Noah Thomas catches the eye as the heartthrob, Artie, who likes to gossip with Nancy and Oliver. ‘What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s a-happening?’ he says, quoting a refrain from Jesus Christ Superstar. You have to pay attention to catch all the references. That’s part of the fun. The international success of Six has spawned a host of copycat shows whose quality is rather variable. The imitators will now flock to the Garrick in the hope of replicating this dazzling effort. Stick with the original. This is a massive, joyous, sensational hit.
Park200 has a topical show about sexual abuse allegations. 23.5 Hours by Carey Crim tells the story of Tom, a devoted English teacher, who serves two years in jail for molesting the lead actress in a school production of Romeo and Juliet. After his release, Tom returns home to a rather chilly welcome. His best buddy believes his version of events but his wife, Leigh, harbours secret doubts. ‘It was a hug. I was comforting a distraught student,’ says Tom who claims that his accuser told the police a pack of lies.
The family home is besieged by vigilantes who spray graffiti on the front door and lob rocks at windows
The family home is besieged by vigilantes who spray graffiti on the front door and lob rocks through the windows, and the telephone glows red-hot with nuisance phone calls. The interiors are beautifully furnished by designer Carla Goodman and the central performance by Lisa Dwan (Leigh) is heartbreaking to watch. In public, she defends her husband and yet she can’t bring herself to normalise their sexual relationship. It’s her knife-edge uncertainty that makes the play compelling.
The second half brings a superbly concealed surprise about Tom’s past which casts their marriage in a completely different light. The brilliance of the twist is that Leigh knows about it already. If you enjoy a thriller that keeps you guessing, this one’s for you.
Ten times better than Taylor Swift: Romance, by Fontaines D.C., reviewed
Grade: B+
Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it translates these days – electronic bombast, which is of course available now at the flick of a switch in the studio. The song is not enough, nowhere near enough. What you need, to elevate your infantile and asinine observations of the world and your sad lack of a good choon, is confected importance. This has been increasingly true since about 1965, but never more so than now. The song is not enough? That’s because it’s not a very good song, kiddo. Write a good song and, you’ll find, marvellously, it really is enough.
Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. are a good case in point. Post punk, of course, but within that rather arid and tuneless milieu a band hitherto possessed of plenty of hooks and a quantum of energy. They still have that here, on which, bless ’em, they imagine is a dystopic fantasy. Oh, please, spare us. It’s still a goodish album, by our modern standards. You can enjoy and possibly even thrill to the power pop of ‘Here’s The Thing’ and, even more so, ‘Favourite’ – which sounds like the dB’s except slightly less charming.
The title track is a slight but pleasing melody stretched out until it forgets what it was there for. I can appreciate the restrained chug of ‘In The Modern World’. The big single – ‘Starburster’ – is truly awful, though, full of appropriated monotone ur-rap vocals with the usual inane and ungainly rhymes. But they have something, this band – something which is smothered under the tyranny of Now. In their desperation to be relevant they sacrifice the stuff which was original and good about them. It’s ten times better than Taylor Swift, though.
In defence of McJobs
The burden of higher taxation must fall on those with ‘the broadest shoulders’, says the Prime Minister, and City folks assume that means yet more raids on banks. Soft targets because no one loves them, they have also profited from higher interest rates. But they’re already subject to a surcharge on corporation tax and an extra levy on the size of their balance sheets – one effect of which has been to shrink their appetite for the corporate lending which is essential for Labour’s growth ambitions.
Loans to small- and medium-sized enterprises fell for five successive quarters to the end of last year and the level was still lower in Q1 2024 than in Q3 2022. Ask any of our Economic Innovator Award entrepreneurs how difficult it is even to open an account, never mind asking for an overdraft. The Chancellor’s priority should not be to treat banks as tax ATMs but to push them to support business customers better.
The McJobs generation
‘My first job was at McDonald’s when I was 16,’ says an Innovator entrant who runs a flourishing high street chain. ‘Mine too,’ chips in one of the judges, now a senior City financier, ‘and my whole hockey team.’ Fifty years ago this week, adverts appeared for £26-a-week opportunities in the UK’s first McDonald’s outlet, due to be opened in Woolwich by DJ Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart on 12 October. That anniversary has been promoted all summer, offering a chance to ponder its implications for inflation (burger, fries and shake, 48 pence then, £6.69 now) and public health: after half a century of fast food, the UK is the fattest nation in western Europe and the ‘birthday special’ 780-calorie Double Big Mac won’t help.
But more important is the question of whether all those starter jobs in McDonald’s and Burger King turned out good or bad for the career prospects of the teenagers concerned. As far back as 1996, Labour politicians were preaching against supposedly dead-end burger-flipping, especially on what came to be known as zero-hours terms – and I was writing here in its defence, pointing out that it taught responsibility, punctuality and teamwork as preparation for grown-up employment and self-betterment. Whether that argument can be applied to today’s legion of disappointed graduate baristas is not so obvious, but I sense yesterday’s ‘McJobs’ generation has no regrets.
Hero of Grangemouth
If Sir Jim Ratcliffe can’t make a go of Grangemouth, no one can. Ratcliffe’s petrochemical conglomerate Ineos has owned Scotland’s only oil refinery for almost two decades and invested £1 billion there, despite relentless hostility from the left-wing Scottish establishment. Leaders of the Unite union hate him even more, having been trounced by him in a hard-fought dispute at the plant in 2011. Lately it has been losing £400,000 per day and Ineos has confirmed plans to convert it to a fuel import depot, with the loss of 400 of its remaining 450 jobs. According to Unite, that’s ‘an act of industrial vandalism’; according to Ineos, it’s inevitable given Grangemouth’s high cost base relative to global competitors. Meanwhile, alternative buyers look unlikely to shape up.
Ratcliffe’s public standing has risen since he invested £1.3 billion for a 28 per cent stake in Manchester United, sidelining the even more despised Glazer family. But given that he’s the only Briton of his generation to build a world-scale industrial business, the media’s habitual caricature of him as a capitalist monster has been disgraceful. The Scots should salute him for keeping Grangemouth alive so long.
Rail marathon
Forgive a trainspotting diversion, but I’m on a railway marathon this month, for Innovator judging and other reasons: well over 3,000 miles on 22 services run by seven operating companies. Anecdotal it may be, but with one journey in three suffering serious delays, I’d say my tour is as fair a way as any of assessing whether Labour’s plan to bring train operators under public ownership within a ‘unified governance structure’ might please passengers or make them even angrier. Here’s what I found.
Most delays are caused by failures, cock-ups (how is it possible for mid-evening mainline services to be held behind a slow freight train?) and trespass in the track-and-signal fiefdom of nationalised Network Rail. Only one longueur was attributed to a resting driver – but it’s surely no coincidence that fellow passengers complain most about operators such as TransPennine and LNER which have already returned to state hands but are also held to ransom by Aslef, the drivers’ union. Meanwhile there’s plenty of new rolling stock run by privatised operators and their on-train crews are generally keen to help, whereas station staff are too often not. My preliminary advice to ministers? Drop the anti-privatisation rhetoric, learn from the best private operators, invest more in the infrastructure you already control and rein in the unions. Some hope.
Angela’s blessing
I’ve also been flying – from London City airport, where Angela Rayner appalled climate activists last month by approving an annual capacity increase from 6.5 to nine million passengers. I wonder whether she had calculated that fewer financiers and investors from the City and Canary Wharf will quit the UK altogether after the forthcoming Budget if they can ease their tax position by frequent-flying from a nearby mini-airport. It’s certainly where I’d suggest parking your private jet, but the car journey to central London is a nightmare so you’ll need a helicopter as well unless you love the ramshackle Docklands Light Railway. Or perhaps a bankers’ consortium might revive the riverboat shuttle to the terminal that failed when the airport itself was struggling some years ago: these days, it seems, anything’s possible with Angela Rayner’s blessing.
Letters: The mass appeal of cathedrals
Mass appeal
Sir: The upcoming ‘rave’ at Peterborough Cathedral follows the trajectory of using this sacred space as a mere entertainment venue (‘Raving mad’, 14 September). Previous secular attempts to commercialise include ‘experiences’ of the moon, dinosaurs, the deep sea and light shows.
I assume the rave organisers did not witness the cathedral in June when a Saturday evening vigil mass was celebrated by the Catholic Bishop of East Anglia for local Catholics. When used for its original and sacred purpose, Peterborough Cathedral was filled with Catholics participating in the divine liturgy. Many were standing for want of seats, like some of our churches on Sundays.
It was worth renting out the cathedral, not only to celebrate mass with other Peterborough Catholics, but to show what was and what could have been had England stayed on the narrow path. While I agree with Douglas Murray that it is awe-inspiring to see the building when empty, it is abundantly more uplifting to see the cathedral rightly filled.
Simon Charles Elliott
Peterborough
Class act
Sir: Claude Elliott, the former provost of Eton, may have described the teaching of English as ‘Jeans and homosexuality’ (Notes, 14 September) but he did give permission for a play production, albeit with the proviso that ‘It should not be too good’. Neither was he musical: overhearing the choir practising a descant, he assumed there was a riot and tried to restore order.
Rhidian Llewellyn
London SW14
Poll position
Sir: You assert in the Diary (14 September) that The Spectator doesn’t endorse candidates. This is doubtless true. Yet as secretary I recall your predecessor Dominic Lawson informing the board at its quarterly meeting in March 1992 that he had arranged to bring forward by two days the publication date that would otherwise have coincided with the general election on 9 April. This, he explained, would allow him to offer readers guidance on how to cast their votes.
One of the directors, Norman Tebbit, asked if the editor would care to take the board into his confidence. Lawson provided the expected reassurance. However, when it came to the issue immediately before the election, it included only nuanced support for the Conservatives. Simon Heffer, described in the strapline as intoxicated by the exuberance of Mrs Thatcher’s verbosity, reported how in Maldon High Street she had ‘lectured bewildered passers-by about the iniquities of socialism… Mr Major was mentioned only in a recherché reference to his superiority to the other two party leaders when being interviewed on television; the government’s policies of the last 16 months not at all’.
Anthony Rentoul
Twickenham
Fruit loop
Sir: In his recent review of Sally Coulthard’s The Apple: a Delicious History (Books, 17 August), Pen Vogler refers to ‘Milton retrofit[ing] the apple to the Bible’s generic “fruit of the tree of knowledge”, making the most of the Latin malus for apple and evil’. In fact, malus means apple tree; the Latin for apple is malum with a long ‘a’, whereas evil is malum with a short ‘a’, and the two words are unrelated.
While in western Christianity the tree is taken to be an apple tree and the fruit an apple, the Garden of Eden story in Genesis doesn’t in fact mention an apple tree or that Adam and Eve ate an apple. Down the ages, various other fruits, such as the grape, the fig and the pomegranate, malum granatum in Latin, have been suggested as being the forbidden fruit. Certainly, though, it’s easier to say ‘Adam’s apple’ than ‘Adam’s pomegranate’ in memory of the fruit that supposedly got stuck in Adam’s throat.
Richard Symington
London SW1
Case history
Sir: Mark Palmer is right to extol the virtues of briefcases but also a caution that goes with it (Notes on backpacks, 7 September). For years I carried all my valuables in a plastic bag on the premise no one would nick it. Then, interviewing an eminent Parisian 20 years ago, he remarked: ‘How unprofessional!’ Off I went to the Rue Saint-Jacques and spent £150 on a leather satchel. Recently in Barcelona I was robbed of my faithful companion (passport, mobile and specs inside) in broad daylight. Mark Palmer wants the return of the briefcase. So do I.
Rory Knight Bruce
Crediton, Devon
A problem shared
Sir: Melissa Kite’s article about the sharing of tales of surgical procedures (Real life, 7 September) struck a chord. My husband and I are in our seventies and enjoy the company of friends within our age group. Whenever we meet up, a ritual conversation has to take place before getting on with analysing politics or bemoaning the state of the world: one that has affectionately become known as an ‘organ recital’. It’s a sort of disease-resistant Top Trumps. Sharing our medical and surgical experiences enables us to deny the inexorable march of time and reduce the threat of life-shortening illnesses to that of a minor irritation that we can easily live with. It’s a sort of survival tactic – not hypochondria but quite the opposite. It’s what keeps us going.
Janet Cardell
Potters Bar, Hertfordshire
Munich’s men
Sir: I do not wish to be pedantic over such a tragedy as the Munich air disaster, but Ian Sansom’s otherwise excellent and sensitive review of Munichs by David Peace (Books, 14 September) incorrectly stated that Danny Blanchflower had been rescued from the wreckage by Harry Gregg, when it should have referred to his younger brother Jackie Blanchflower as having had his life saved.
Michael Dixon
Sunderland, Tyne and Wear
The adult ADHD trap
I was on the bus recently and bored when I decided not to ignore but to answer one of those online questionnaires about adult ADHD. It was on Facebook, I think. Question 1) Am I easily distracted? Well, yes. 2) Am I often late? 3) Do I regularly forget appointments? Yes and yes.
By the time I had arrived at work I had signed up to something called Impulse brain training. And in a few days I was quite sure that I’d been bravely suffering with undiagnosed ADHD for decades. I was half-caught in the adult ADHD trap, though I didn’t know it yet.
Are you always late? Do you let people down? Don’t worry! Don’t sweat it! That’s just your ADHD
I asked my brother and my friends what they thought and instead of laughing, they nodded sadly. Yes, yes. They’d seen the online tests too and it all made sense. In fact they were reasonably sure they all had ADHD too. All brave sufferers together, it turned out. I began to read enticing accounts of the soothing effect of Ritalin (a stimulant) and Adderall (an amphetamine) on the ADHD brain and to wonder, given the great and growing demand and the national shortage of medication, how I might get my mitts on some.
If the trap didn’t close on me, I owe it to a news story I saw last Friday out of the corner of my eye: ‘ADHD drugs significantly raise risk of heart disease in adults.’ It was as if I’d woken up on a surgeon’s table to find myself about to undergo an unnecessary op. How did I get here? Why was I even considering the nasty drugs? Why have so very many other adults done just the same?
Not so long ago ADHD was a childhood disorder – something gone a touch awry in the brains of those boys in class who couldn’t focus and bounced about on their chairs. Now there’s a great crush of perfectly normal adults bullying meds out of their GPs, and none left for the poor bouncing boys. And there’s suddenly a great clamour of charities all ‘raising awareness’ of adult ADHD and a boom town of clinics in the W1 area offering private Ritalin prescriptions – (almost) no questions asked.
But it’s nonsense, all of it, isn’t it? Of course some adults are disorganised and distracted. We work, we have children, some of us are scatty, but that’s character, not disease. Our short-term memories have been boiled alive by Apple Inc. but that doesn’t mean we have ADHD. In fact it’s precisely because we don’t have adult ADHD that it’s become such a horrifyingly successful industry. The worried well have cash to burn on meds and personalised brain training plans.
Just enter the letters ‘ADHD’ into a search box and you’ll see. It’s like spilling blood into the water around Amity Island. The sharks begin to circle almost instantly. For younger generations, it’s online influencers. The ADHD hashtag on TikTok has more than 20 billion views; #adhdawareness has nearly a billion. And views mean money. #ADHD delivers clips and survival tips; hot girls in a hot mess, and not just an explanation for your unreliability but a blanket excuse. Are you always late? Do you let your friends and family down? Don’t worry! Don’t sweat it! That’s just your ADHD. Nothing to be done. Only a fascist would hold you accountable.
For older adults, the sharks come in the form of tests and then tailored life plans delivered to your inbox – thanks Impulse! – for just (let me check) $39.98 a week. (Argh! What was I thinking?) The tests pop up everywhere now, on every internet page I visit. And I marvel at the speed with which they convert self-pitying curiosity into an established diagnosis in a few quick tickbox stages. 1) Find out if you have you have ADHD. 2) What’s your ADHD type? 3) Here’s how to manage your unique ADHD type. A little begging the question, a little sunk cost fallacy and Bob’s your direct debit.
All the age-old huckster tricks are deployed in the adult ADHD grift. A Time magazine piece, while of course not sceptical, did at least note that approximately half the ADHD TikToks made assertions so vague almost everyone could feel they applied to them. ‘If you don’t like doing homework, you have ADHD’; ‘If you zone out during meetings, you probably have ADHD’. These are known as Barnum statements, named after the showman P.T. Barnum whose catchphrase was: ‘A sucker is born every minute.’
The NHS has been so overwhelmed by the rise in adult ADHD that it’s launched a new taskforce, and as I read about it, up popped an ad for another clinic: ‘The letter you see here defines your ADHD type!’ ‘Only adults with ADHD can solve this problem!’
But even once you’ve seen through the racket, it’s surprisingly hard to leave adult ADHD behind. Mary, we’re sorry to see you go! Why did you cancel? Did you forget your personalised plan? Regain control of your life! Don’t let ADHD hold you back. Claim your plan and get up to 20 per cent off! Make that 50 per cent… 75 per cent!’
The most repulsive of the countless charities set up to combat the ‘stigma’ around adult ADHD is ADHD UK, whose chief executive, a Henry Shelford, sounds almost as if he’s threatening any adults in denial: ‘It’s chilling to see so many forced into hiding their neurodiversity because of fear of stigma and discrimination.’ Chilling? Forced into hiding? How can it be chilling when it’s very uncertain that adult-onset ADHD exists at all, and when tests done on adults with self-reported ADHD have for the most part shown them to be perfectly neurotypical with none of the distinctive mental patterns found in children diagnosed with ADHD?
Another charity, ADDitude, suggests that if adults with ADHD have family members who ‘mistakenly believe only children can have ADHD’, it might be better not to engage but simply to cut them from your life. Cling tight to these family members, I say, because they’re almost certainly right.
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